Hilary A. Smith. Forgotten Disease

Hilary Smith’s Forgotten Disease examines the changing development of the Chinese illness called jiao qi 脚气 (foot qi in translation) over a millennium and how its modern biomedical identification as beriberi in the early twentieth century misleads and causes confusion of its meanings ever since. Initially a Japanese epidemic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries called Kakke (脚气) was identified as beriberi. Since Japan used Chinese medical terms and epistemology in its traditional medical literature, similar Chinese characters of jiao qi were used for Kakke. Modernizers simply applied beriberi to jiao qi in China after it was used to translate Kakke in Japan. Subsequently, the concept of jiao qi has attained different meanings in China and greater East Asia. In China, it means beriberi in medicine but athlete’s foot in popular understanding; and people call beriberi jiao qi bing (foot qi disease) to distinguish from jiao qi. Smith starts and ends her book by calling attention to an important issue in the global understanding of diseases: should Chinese medicine be understood in its own terms or be dictated by modern biomedicine? She argues, using the historical illumination of jiao qi as a case study, against the narrow and simple way of biomedical identification of ancient Chinese diseases. The fundamental problem of biomedical translation of ancient illnesses into single modern diseases, she explains, lays in the fact that it “distorts our understanding of the past...ignoring the extensive body of premodern Chinese medical literature.... It closes off alternative readings of ancient medical texts” (p.4). Furthermore, the imposition of modern biomedical discoveries upon ancient illnesses ignored the social and cultural environments that shaped the emergence of diseases and the concepts of diseases. In the seven chapters of her book, Smith provides a larger historical context of political and social changes when she discusses the transformation of the understanding of jiao qi over the millennium and the biomedical dominance over ancient Chinese medical knowledge of illnesses around the turn of the twentieth century during the height of Western imperialism in East Asia.

Alternative medicine · Art · Beriberi · China · Identification (biology) · Literature · Traditional Chinese medicine · Traditional medicine · Classics · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

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