Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JRV 054
JRV 054
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei. Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over
China’s Modernity. Chicago, Illinois, University of Chicago Press, 2014. x, 382
pp., illus. $35.00 (cloth).
historically to the pharmacological research into Chinese drugs in the kanpo revival
movement.
Lei’s study, on the other hand, provides the best account to date of the role of the
state in transforming medicine in China. In his words, “the historic confrontation did
not take place directly between the two styles of medicine but between Chinese
medicine and the modernizing Chinese state” (5). Lei depicts the year 1929 as a piv-
otal turning point for both Western medicine and Chinese medicine as their practi-
tioners redefined the nature of their competition in terms of their alliance with the
state, as opposed to fighting for patients, for instance. The same year that witnessed
the government’s intention to abolish Chinese medicine saw the rise of the National
Medicine Movement. Whereas the evidence for the state’s alliance with Western
medicine runs across the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service and the
Ministry of Health, Chinese medicine’s alliance with the state culminated in the
establishment of the Institute of National Medicine. Lei refines his argument, how-
ever, by showing that this is not merely a matter of political struggle, but one with
epistemological consequences. Specifically, he calls the creation of modern Chinese
medicine a process of speciation, out of which a new “mongrel” form of medicine sud-
denly emerged (making Chinese medicine “neither donkey nor horse”). “The impor-
tant point,” writes Lei, “is that the desirability, the derogatory connotation, and the
dangerous potential of mongrel medicine were all inseparable from . . . the project of
Scientizing Chinese Medicine” (163). The spirit of scientism first found its most
explicit pronouncement during the May Fourth Era, but it became, according to Lei,
a key motto embraced by Chinese physicians in response to Yu’s proposal a decade
later. Although notable efforts to integrate the two styles of medicine existed before
1929 (Tang Zonghai’s work springs to mind), this moment marked the first time
when Chinese-style physicians were forced to cope collectively with the concept of
science. Having succeeded in acquiring the necessary state capital for establishing the
Institute of National Medicine, they began to marginalize those peers who refrained
from engaging with the project of scientization.
It is impossible to do justice to these two meticulously researched and clearly
written monographs in a single review essay, but certain elements do stand out as
especially interesting and path-breaking. Andrews’s discussion of the advent of scien-
tific acupuncture provides a sorely needed historical explanation for its contemporary
survival and popularity. After all, the practice was shunned by elite doctors in China
before the twentieth century, so how did it become such an important icon of
Chinese medicine today? The answer, according to Andrews, lies in the effort of
those medical thinkers who attempted to give acupuncture a modern scientific basis.
Here, the work of the physician Cheng Dan’an (1899–1957) is remarkable in that he
mapped Western anatomy and physiology—such as the physical structures and func-
tional systems of nerves, blood vessels, and lymph glands—onto the meridian tracts
of acupuncture (jingluo). For a similar experiment in the scientization of Chinese
medicine, Lei’s chapter on the birth of the new antimalarial drug changshan (dichroa
root) reveals the political nature of this discovery. Among other things that made
356 Journal of the History of Medicine
this an anomalous event, participating researchers violated the basic protocol for con-
ducting scientific research on Chinese drugs, but it was only because of this violation
that they were able to show the antimalarial efficacy of changshan as efficiently and
quickly as they did. This chapter in the history of Chinese medicine therefore not
only dispels the longstanding myth that Chinese medicine is ineffective in treating
infectious diseases, but it also sheds light on the intertwined nature of experimenta-
tion, laboratory science, and actor-network that turned a research design into a politi-
cal strategy—a story familiar to critical scholars of science but told with a brand-new
cast.
Whereas previous studies have tended to shy away from delving directly into the
encounter between Chinese-style and Western-style medicine, these two books rep-
resent the most innovative and magisterial treatment to date of the transformation of
Chinese medicine in the first half of the twentieth century. They show that although
Chinese physicians have struggled with medical hegemony in myriad ways, genuine
interests in “epistemological egalitarianism or relativist pluralism”—however volatile
in becoming the most obvious end product of history—have nonetheless served as a
key catalyst in medicine’s global past.
“A large family . . . with a beautiful name but most unpleasant habits.” Such is a force-
ful description of the bacterial genus, Salmonella, the subject of Anne Hardy’s new
monograph. The group was confounded in the late nineteenth century by the nebu-
lous monikers enteric fever, typhoid, and summer diarrhea, yet a century later, micro-
biologists recognized over two thousand and five hundred specific zoonotic
serotypes of Salmonella, the most virulent being Salmonella typhi, the causative organ-
ism of typhoid fever. Hardy’s goal—formidable in chronology and scope—is the
weaving of three narratives; the modern history of how Salmonella became a public
health problem, the laboratory research that unraveled the Salmonella family of bac-
teria, and public health attempts to curb food poisoning Salmonella outbreaks.
Following her longstanding interest in Victorian public health, and presaged by a
series of signpost journal articles on typhoid fever, food poisoning, and veterinary