Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China PDF

Rating: (1 reviews) Author: Ruth Rogaski ISBN : 9780520240018 New from $56.50 Format: PDF

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Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.

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• Hardcover: 415 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520240014
• ISBN-13: 978-0520240018
• Product Dimensions: 1.2 x 6.4 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China PDF

The concept of hygiene is one that has seen a remarkable amount of change in the last two centuries in both the Western and Eastern worlds as various scientific advances and "modern medicine" come to take center stage. In Hygienic Modernity: Meanings for Health and Disease in Treaty Port China, Ruth Rogaski does a remarkable job of tracking those changes as she examines the changing meaning of weisheng and and the evolution of public health in China or, more specifically, the treaty port of Tianjin.
Her project is an ambitious one as she includes not just Chinese perceptions of weisheng, but the conceptions of health and hygiene held by the different colonizers of Tianjin. She tracks the ideas of hygiene in China, Europe, the United States and Japan as they evolve at home and are brought into and enforced in Tianjin. Pulling upon an amazing number of sources, she demonstrates how the idea of weisheng begins to shift from a more traditional conception of guarding health, in many ways very similar to early conceptions of health in the West, to a more modern, scientific idea of health and hygiene. The health of the masses becomes a concern of the state and the colonizers and standards of hygiene come to be enforced upon an often suspicious or reluctant populace.
Most fascinating are the elite ideas of China as the "sick man of Asia," whose deficiencies are inherent flaws of the Chinese. The Chinese elite actually embraced this idea, she writes, thanks in part to the allure of science and the mediating role of Japan.
This is a careful, deeply nuanced history incorporating multiple case studies and fascinating details of the daily lives of those who lived and died in Tianjin. Her discourse on race, health, and colonization should prove to be of great use to expand their understanding of colonialism and her history will prove fascinating to all those interested in the evolution and institutionalization of public health.

By Shirley Field