This book is the first scholarly work in English on medicine for women in pre-Song China. The essays deal with key issues in early Chinese gynecology and obstetrics, and how they were formulated before the Song when medicine for women reached maturity. The reader will find that medical questions in early China also reflected religious and social issues. The authors, based in North America and East Asia, describe and analyze women’s bodies, illnesses, and childbirth experiences according to a variety of archaeological materials and historical texts. The essays reveal a rich and complex picture of early views on the female medical and social body that have wide implications for other institutions of the period, and on medicine and women in the later imperial era.
Angela Ki Che Leung, Doctor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, is Research Fellow of the Academia Sinica, Taipei. She has published on Ming-Qing social history, including charitable organizations and medicine in society. Her present work is on the history of leprosy and history of hygiene and public health in China.
All those interested in history of medicine, early Chinese social history, history of women, gender studies.