Hygienic modernity : meanings of health and disease in treaty-port China / Ruth Rogaski.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rogaski, Ruth.

Series:

Asia--local studies/global themes.

Asia--local studies/global themes

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Health behavior--China.

Health behavior.

Public health--China.

Public health.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (419 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

"Conquering the one hundred diseases": weisheng before the twentieth century

Health and disease in Heaven's Ford

Medical encounters and divergences

Translating weisheng in treaty-port China

Transforming eisei in Meiji Japan

Deficiency and sovereignty: hygienic modernity in the occupation of Tianjin, 1900-1902

Seen and unseen: the urban landscape and boundaries of weisheng

Weisheng and the desire for modernity

Japanese management of germs in Tianjin

Germ warfare and patriotic weisheng.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-395) and index.

ISBN:

9786612357299

9780520930605

0520930606

9781282357297

1282357298

9781597346665

1597346667

OCLC:

58728552