The Life and Times of Sir Kai Ho Kai

The past two decades have witnessed renewed scholarly interest in the history of Western medicine in China. Influenced by innovative approaches to the study of colonial medicine in Africa and other parts of Asia, as well as by the shift away from the triumphalist narrative that characterized earlier interpretations, China scholars have reexamined the nineteenth-century encounter between Western and Chinese medicine. This newer work seeks to place both systems into historical context, and does not assume the superiority of Western knowledge and practice. The Chinese appropriation of Western medicine is now viewed as a complex and ever-shifting process of negotiation and selective assimilation, undertaken by multiple actors for diverse purposes. Chinese resistance to Western medicine is no longer interpreted as a consequence of lingering xenophobia and cultural conservatism, but rather as a reasonable response to an alien and intrusive medical system that had not satisfactorily demonstrated its therapeutic superiority to the indigenous one

Appropriation · Art · China · Colonialism · Conservatism · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Hegemony · Indigenous · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Traditional Chinese medicine · Western medicine · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Medicine · Philosophy