Special Section on Gender and Medicine

Notes on Contributors

Reviewed by: The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule by Reiko Shinno William A. McGrath Reiko Shinno. The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule. Needham Research Institute Series. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2016. xxii + 194 pp. Ill. $51.95 (978-1-138-09932-6). Do not be misled by the slight stature of The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule; it contains multitudes. In just over two hundred pages Reiko Shinno effectively synthesizes official edicts and histories, biographies, medical instructions, and gazetteers from the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368), all while responding to English-, Chinese-, and Japanese-language scholarship on both Chinese medical and institutional history. Although the Chinese medical traditions of the Song dynasty (960–1276) have attracted much scholarly attention in recent years (see the prologue and chapter 6), before Shinno's doctoral dissertation (Stanford, 2002) and the Politics of Chinese Medicine, which is an "extensive revision" of her dissertation (p. xiii), the history of Chinese medicine during the Yuan dynasty remained relatively opaque. In what is perhaps its most significant contribution to the field, The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule fills a major lacuna in the intellectual and institutional history of Chinese medicine over the past millennium. If we carefully consider the title of The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule, we might expect a work that explores the official regulation of medicine during the Yuan dynasty. While this is indeed the case, The Politics of Chinese Medicine also provides an overview of the major medical institutions, physicians, and medical texts that emerged during the Yuan period, with a particular focus on the intellectual history of medicine in Southern China under Mongol rule. In chapters 2, 3, and 4 Shinno uses the official edicts preserved in the Institutions of the Yuan (Yuan dianzhang 元典章) and the official histories recorded in the Yuan History (Yuanshi 元史), among many other primary and secondary sources, to describe the establishment of the Imperial Academy of Medicine and regional medical temple-schools (appendix 1), as well as the bureaucratic status of specific physicians (appendix 2) and medical households. These three chapters will surely interest sinologists in particular as well as historians of medicine in general, for, in emphasizing the "politics" in the Politics of Chinese Medicine, they elucidate the relationship between the central government, regional institutions, and familial lineages during the Yuan dynasty for the first time. In addition to this institutional background, chapters 1 and 5 focus on the biographies of specific physicians, while chapter 6 explores the intellectual developments of "Chinese medicine under Mongol rule." Taken together, these chapters demonstrate Shinno's overarching thesis: although the medical institutions that developed during the Yuan have had a limited legacy in the whole of Chinese history, Yuan Jue 袁桷 (1266–1327), Zhu Zhenheng 朱震亨 (1282–1358), and the other physicians of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century China created a "medical theory that is the foundation of East Asian medicine today" (p. 159). In sum, Shinno argues that the study of Chinese medicine under Mongol rule provides key insights into the relationship between Yuan-era politics, people, and philosophy, while also revealing an orthodox synthesis of competing medical interpretations that has persisted down to the present day. [End Page 455] As indicated above, The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule is a consummate work of philology and history, and Shinno should be commended for the precision of her translations and argumentation. At times, however, the argumentation feels too careful—that is, too grounded in philological detail—such that general interpretive analysis is sometimes left to the reader. Although Shinno thoroughly analyzes the representation of physicians according to several different authors in chapter 5, for example, a more comprehensive analysis of these classifications, like that of the term "Confucian physician" (ruyi 儒醫) found in the prologue (p. 6), is left for future studies. Brief mentions of Buddhist (p. 101) and Islamic sources (huihui 回回, pp. 138–40), as well as non-Chinese physicians (appendix 3), also hint at the hybrid and cosmopolitan nature of medical traditions throughout fourteenth-century Eurasia, although a full study of these topics would be beyond the purview of the work in question. Indeed, I have no doubt that Shinno's careful...

Patricia Buckley Ebrey is currently a professor of history at the University of Washington. A leading scholar in the history of Song China, family, gender, and religion, her career mirrors the transformation of the field of Chinese history in many ways. Trained as a sinologist, she was among the first who employed the social sciences to study Chinese history; she not only represents the first generation of women historians in the field of Chinese history, but also was among the first generation of historians to study women in Chinese history. She is an extraordinarily productive scholar, whose interest extends well beyond her primary fields. In addition to a large number of monographs, edited books, and articles covering Chinese history from the Han to late imperial times, she authored and coauthored multiple textbooks in Chinese, East Asian, and world history. In the last three decades, her Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, China: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, and other coauthored textbooks, have greatly influenced how Chinese history is taught in the United States.

This book reconstructs the history of conception, pregnancy and childbirth in Europe from antiquity to the 20th century, focusing on its most significant turning points: the emergence of a medical-scientific approach to delivery in Ancient Greece, the impact of Christianity, the establishment of the man-midwife in the 18th century, the medicalisation of childbirth, the emergence of a new representation of the foetus as "unborn citizen", and, finally, the revolution of reproductive technologies. The book explores a history that, far from being linear, progressive or homogeneous, is characterised by significant continuities as well as transformations. The ways in which a woman gives birth and lives her pregnancy and the postpartum period are the result of a complex series of factors. The book therefore places these events in their wider cultural, social and religious contexts, which influenced the forms taken by rituals and therapeutic practices, religious and civil prescriptions and the regulation of the female body. The investigation of this complex experience represents a crucial contribution to cultural, social and gender history, as well as an indispensable tool for understanding today’s reality. It will be of great use to undergraduates studying the history of childbirth, the history of medicine, the history of the body, as well as women's and gender history more broadly.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Portals in libraries

Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 1931–1934

Gender in Modern East Asia explores the history of women and gender in China, Korea, and Japan from the seventeenth century to the present. This unique volume treats the three countries separately within each time period while also placing them in global and regional contexts. Its transnational and integrated approach connects the cultural, economic, and social developments in East Asia to what is happening across the wider world. The text focuses specifically on the dynamic histories of sexuality; gender ideology, discourse, and legal construction; marriage and the family; and the gendering of work, society, culture, and power. Important themes and topics woven through the text include Confucianism, writing and language, the role of the state in gender construction, nationalism, sexuality and prostitution, New Women and Modern Girls, feminisms, comfort women, and imperialism. Accessibly written and comprehensive, Gender in Modern East Asia is a much-needed contribution to the study of the region.

The seminal research of Francesca Bray (1997) and Susan Mann (1992, 1997) on women and domestic work, especially textiles, have inspired a generation of new research in cultural history and art history, and the articles presented in this special issue attest to the productivity of this emergent field of inquiry. But curiously, historians of science and technology—Bray’s intended audience—have been slow in embracing gender in their research agendas (with the notable exception of historians of medicine.) The reasons for this lacuna are complex, but the three articles gathered here suggest at least one answer: that one cannot take gender and women seriously without questioning existing paradigms about innovation, knowledge-making, and skills, and thus the very meanings of “science” and “technology.”

132 Journal of Chinese Religions Power of Place will be an essential text for anyone studying Chinese sacred space and those engaged in crossing doctrinal divides. This book will also be important reading for those involved in the study of Daoism or Buddhism during the medieval period. However, specialists should not just read the chapters on Daoism or just the ones on Buddhism, because by doing so they would miss the key innovations in this work. BRIAN R. DOTT, Whitman College Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China JEFFREY SNYDER-REINKE. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009. Harvard East Asian Monographs 311. xii, 314 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-03334-4. US$45.00,£33.95, €40.50 hardcover. Dry Spells is a refreshing book. It explores how late Imperial local officials dealt with that unsettling and all-too-common predicament: praying for rain in times of drought, knowing that a virtuous official was supposed to be successful in his prayers. By doing so, and without excessive forays into theory or grand generalizations, it shows that Ming and Qing local officials behaved quite differently from what we have repeatedly been told was their habitus—upholding Confucian values and standards, fighting against anything else. In this crucial matter, standards were few, and disregarded anyhow; instead local officials engaged in all kinds of “magic,” gladly struck deals with Buddhists and Daoists, and sometimes staged themselves as star performers in grand public rituals. I confidently expect all JCR readers to enjoy the book, but I also hope it will make an impact on scholars of late imperial sociopolitical history who think that “religion” and “ritual” constitute a separate realm that they do not need to explore themselves. For, as the author argues in his conclusion, the book is as much a contribution to the study of imperial governance as to religious history. The book, distilled from a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Michigan (2006), is dense and very readable. While the first chapter introduces cases from the late Qing press (a key source in this book) and establishes the questions to be considered, and chapter 2 provides the history of official rainmaking in broad strokes from antiquity to the late imperial period, the core of the book is basically micro-narrative, attempting as it does to sketch out what happened when a drought forced a local official to do something about it, however much the Book Reviews 133 official in question was reluctant (understandably so) to act. Chapter 3 lays out the official norms (imperial rituals and regulations for local officials) and chapter 4 details what these officials actually did, choosing among a large array of options. Chapter 5 is devoted to one particular rainmaking liturgy that seems to have been widely disseminated and used, written by a most interesting figure, Ji Dakui 紀大奎 (1746-1825), who deserves a monograph devoted just to him. The more liturgical aspects of the rituals are discussed in the appendices with three translations of liturgical manuals (one from the Han period by Dong Zhongshu [董 仲舒, 179–104 BCE], and two versions of Ji Dakui’s liturgy). While it could have been possible to use this fascinating material for a ritual-structural analysis, Snyder-Reinke has aptly sorted out and laid out the material for other scholars who would want to go in that direction. Finally, chapter 6 rejoins the current debates on late imperial official and elite religiosity, aptly engaging authors like Watson, Duara, or Szonyi by analyzing how the actual process of rainmaking was contested and negotiated and fell short of expressing, much less imposing, a coherent, empire-wide religious/ritual culture. The author is clearly out to destroy the claim that local officials (and all Chinese elites) were pure Confucians. He argues that decisions on rituals were complex, underdetermined from above (or below), and open to individual creativity, choice, and negotiation. That, in my opinion, is indeed the correct approach to understanding the working of local society and state-society relationships. So, to be clear, I warmly recommend this book to anyone working on late imperial China. The remarks below are not criticisms; rather they...

Globally, one of the most significant trends in theme park development over the past decade has been the increasing focus on intellectual properties as sources of theming. While theme parks in China have also participated in this trend, cultural history in general and Chinese cultural history and heritage in particular have continued to be popular sources of theming. Chinese theme parks, whether public or private enterprises, have thus contributed to the state-led ‘heritage turn’ in China, which from the 1980s onwards has used cultural history and heritage to foster cultural nationalism. The articles gathered here examine the specific motifs and strategies of the commercial, ‘unauthorized’ heritage turn in Chinese theme parks and, by bridging the gap between English- and Chinese-language research on theme parks, seek to foster interdisciplinary and intercultural scholarly exchange in the field of theme park studies.

Although it has been widely acknowledged that quite a high percentage of historical works in Taiwan contributed to the field of modern Chinese history, such understanding remains impressionistic. This paper gives a quantitative analysis in how such academic trend has emerged and changed over the years. The authors examines eight major historical journals, M.A. theses, and dissertations finished between 1945 and 2000 to see how the research trend has shifted during this period. The paper will, on the one hand, concentrate on describing the phenomenon in the field. It will also, on the other, analyze the distribution of works in each sub–field, e.g., econcmic history, political history, social history, etc. to compare with Works in Chinese history as a whole. The period between 1945 and 2000 can be divided into five time span s. In each of the five studies of modern Chinese history possesses the highest percentage among works in Chinese history. Moreover, there are more theses and dissertations than journal papers contributed to this field. By the fifth time span, however, the percentage of theses and dissertations contributed to modern Chinese history is close to that of journal papers. Of 627 theses and dissertations in this field 27.4% works on political and military history, 16.3% intellectual and cultural history, 15.6% international relationship, 14.5% social history, 13.2% economic history, 4.5% educational history, and less than 3% unidentifiable. The lowest percentage among the field are: institutional history (0.3%), history of science (0.5%), history of books (0.5%), art history (1.0%), historiography (1.9%). Of 1,010 journal papers on modern Chinese history, intellectual and cultural history possesses 30.8% of works, political and military history 28.2%, historiography 10.0%, international relationship 8.7%, economic history 8.7%, and social history 5.9%, unidentifiable less than 3.0%. The lowest percentage in the field are: history of women 0.5%, art history 0.6%, history of science (0.6%), history of books (0.6%), history of religion 1.3%.

W estern historical scholarship on late imperial China seems less settled than ever. In recent years it has evolved in directions that significantly alter longstanding interpretations of the late imperial state. Once-definitive perspectives regarding the scope of the late imperial state, its processes and institutional trends, and its reach into Chinese society have been reopened. New frameworks built on different lines of inquiry and evidence have challenged enduring views on the reasons both for the unprecedented longevity of the Qing dynasty as an alien conquest regime and for its decline in the nineteenth century and demise in the early twentieth century. Presumed continuities between the late imperial past and the authoritarian present no longer seem as compelling as they once did. In their place a renewed appreciation of patterns of dynamism and change has suggested more fertile approaches to making the past serve the present. With all of these changes, alternative chronologies built around newly recognized historical turning points reorganize what seems useful in understanding how we got to the Chinese present from its late imperial past. More than ever, historians seem to speak with contending voices, not consensus regarding state and society in late imperial times. For historians of China's late imperial era – here defined as China from the mid-sixteenth century until the 1911 Revolution – the emergence of these changes in the historiography of the late imperial era has seemed evolutionary and gradual. For them, they are the familiar consequences of the normal functioning of a now well-established disciplinary com-munity. Older answers to fundamental questions raise new questions whose answers in turn refine, modify, and sometimes transform previous work.

The State of Women's and Gender History in Eastern Europe:The Case of Hungary Andrea Pető (bio) and Judith Szapor (bio) In November 2003 fourteen women academics, all members of the Hungarian Historical Association (HHA), signed the founding charter for a section of Women's and Gender History, only to be voted down by the general assembly of the Association. A year and a half later the new section was finally incorporated, but with the understanding that it should not expect any financial or organizational support from the HHA.1 This episode is characteristic of the state of women's and gender history in Hungary today: it demonstrates the infrastructural vacuum and institutional resistance against which a few committed practitioners of women's and gender history have been struggling to establish a foothold. To attribute this lamentable situation to patriarchal power structures in academia would not do justice to the complex origins and motives of this resistance; here we can highlight only a few of them. Mainstream Hungarian historiography had long been known for its resistance to theory in general and reluctance to break with the positivist tradition in particular. From at least the late nineteenth century, representatives of the historical profession had been tied to the political leadership of the day to a degree unthinkable for Western academics. The tradition of antidemocratic political leaders and their ideologies willingly supported by leading historians continued after 1945, with the relationship between power and academia becoming even cozier, and the uses of history harnessed more directly than ever before. Shortly after 1945, a complete overhaul of academic infrastructure resulted in Soviet-style institutes, staffed with the best and the brightest but judged politically unreliable to teach. With a strict control of university personnel and curriculum, the artificial separation of the teaching and research of history had been thus complete.2 Yet for all its revolutionary zeal, when it came to women as subjects of history, the new, Marxist historiography displayed a remarkable continuity with the old, nationalistic historiography. Their respective pantheon of eminent women almost completely overlapped, from the heroines of the centuries of battles for independence to the writers and educators of the Hungarian Enlightenment and progressive national revival. To these were added the heroines of progressive causes of the recent past, with a few pioneers of women's emancipation thrown in for good measure. In keeping with this curious continuity, the new, Marxist version of Hungarian historiography buried even deeper the memory of the bourgeois women's rights movement of the [End Page 160] early 1900s than the prewar Horthy regime. After all, was not "the woman question" superseded and solved, once and for all, by the Marxist-Leninist state and "statist feminism," and bourgeois feminism, along with the liberal notion of women's rights, condemned to the dustbin of history? Following the deep freeze of the Stalinist years, from the late 1970s the historical profession experienced a gradual renewal while the university curriculum kept lagging behind. During this period, historical research benefited from a relative liberalization of academia, marked by increased tolerance for East-West academic relations, the rehabilitation of the previously banished field of sociology, and interdisciplinary methodologies in general. In the early 1980s, the historian Péter Hanák led a charge on the traditional, positivist, and vulgar Marxist frameworks, challenging the long-entrenched divisions of political, ethnic, social, and economic history. He reintroduced cultural and intellectual history and inspired a host of younger scholars to embark on the study of urbanization, domesticity, and the family.3 With the establishment of a chair of Cultural Studies, he even managed to break the seemingly unassailable walls of Budapest University. Around the same time, the methodologies of economic history, historical demography, and sociology embraced by historians paid dividends in investigations into the roots of economic and social modernization, including historical studies on women's employment and specific female occupations.4 Meanwhile, historians of the medieval and early modern period quietly joined the Annales-influenced European mainstream with studies on witches and female saints.5 The widespread influence of the Annales—as in other East-Central European countries in the period of state socialism—while indicative of the traditional...