 | Indiana University and its co-sponsor, the Peking University Health Science Center, have received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support a project on the history of Western medicine in China from 1800 to1950. The project will study the establishment and activities of hospitals, medical schools and other institutions in medical care, education and public health campaigns. The “Western Medicine in China” project has two main activities. The first is to hold two scholarly conferences, one scheduled for Indianapolis in June 2012 and the other in Beijing, China, in the summer of 2013. These events will identify and bring together North American and Chinese scholars who will present their latest research on western medicine in China and discuss promising areas for future research. The second activity will be to identify historical research materials housed at over a dozen archives around the world with the intent of making the resources more readily available to interested scholars and students. Finding guides and digitized copies of selected primary resources, documents and publications will also be made available online. |
Resources portal [under construction]Project participants:
For more information contact William Schneider, Ph.D.
| Conference information
Indiana University (Indianapolis) will host the first of two conferences aimed to increase understanding of Western medicine (西医 xiyi in Chinese) in modern China in the pre-Maoist period. We invite conference papers to examine the establishment of this new medicine (新医 xinyi) which left archives tracing new directions in the health of China’s women, children and men, patient-physician relationships, and conflicting and merging theories and practices of healing. We wish to encourage the growing scholarship in this field with basic institutional research and broader topics in the social and cultural history of health and medicine. Understudied topics in the field include: hospital-based studies of specific diseases; the rise of medical leaders trained in China; Japanese and European influence in various periods; the role of military medicine, and of medicine in war; change and continuity of specific institutions that merged or were abandoned; racial medicine, anthropometry and physical anthropology among physicians; missionary physicians and Chinese physicians abroad as two-way conduits of global and local medical knowledge; and cooperation and conflict in Chinese and foreign medical philanthropy. Despite recent advances, the field of possible topics is still extremely broad; paper proposals on these and other topics are welcome. Selected conference papers will be included in a peer-reviewed, edited volume. We welcome proposals from both established scholars and senior graduate students. Please submit an abstract of 250 words, along with a brief CV, no later than December 1, 2011. Inquiries and abstracts can be directed by email to David Luesink, or phone: (317) 274-4740 PRC Scholars: We have funding set aside for travel and research costs for a small number of junior scholars from the PRC who have not had a chance to access North American archives. For scholars from the PRC, please include a separate statement of 150 words describing which North American archives related to medicine in China you would like to use and how these would fit into your research. |
