Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History

Description

By Charlotte Furth
Trade paperback book
ISBN 9780520208292
355 pages, 6.00 x 9.00″

This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke, or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres, it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders. The author locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on gestation and birth. Furth analyzes the relationship of language, text, and practice and reexamines the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.