Connie A. Shemo. The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872–1937

Connie A. Shemo and Guangqiu Xu cover some common ground in their impressive histories documenting the influence of Christian medical missions and Western medicine in modernizing China. Both of these layered studies synthesize a wide array of published scholarship and include extensive new information based on their use of English- and Chinese-language archival sources, but their approaches and the specific historical documentation they draw on are quite distinct. Xu offers an intellectual history explaining how ideas about modernization, philanthropy, and Western medicine and religion were introduced to China in the treaty port city of Canton (Guangzhou) through the work of American medical missionaries. Xu details the impact of those ideas on Chinese nationalist reformers in the period between 1835 and 1935. Xu, the son of a Chinese physician who practiced medicine in the People's Republic of China (PRC), was himself denied the opportunity to study medicine as he came of...

Ancient history · China · Frontier · Meiji period · Modernization theory · Nationalism · Political science · Race (biology) · Scholarship · Sociology · Treaty · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies