Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: November 29, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 415
ISBN-13: 9780520240018
Subjects: History; Medical / Nursing; Health behavior; History: American; China; USA; Public health; Health Care Delivery; History / General; Asia - China
First sentence: What associations would the term weisheng create in the mind of a Chinese scholar living in a nineteenth-century city?
Description: Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng--which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"--As it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.--Publisher description.