Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China

Volker Scheid offers a rich, clear, and detailed account of contemporary Chinese medicine as intrinsically pluralistic and dispersed, dynamic and local. Drawing upon eighteen months of field research, ethnographic observation of more than four thousand clinical encounters, and his own experience as a practitioner of Chinese medicine, Scheid argues for an interpretive stance that takes pluralism in medicine as an object of research in its own right, rather than a "surface phenomena in need of constant explanation" (p. 44). Scheid's work is avowedly interdisciplinary, and it contains real treasure, particularly for medical anthropologists, historians of colonial medicine, and historians who address the history of post-1949 China. Scheid's overview of Chinese medicine since 1949, in particular, will be a gift to students and those teaching this period, region, or medical culture as nonexperts

China · Colonialism · Epistemology · History of China · Pluralism (philosophy) · Political science · Sociology · Treasure · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy