A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History: 960–1665This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke, or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres, it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders. Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history. |
Contents
Medical History Gender and the Body | 1 |
The Yellow Emperors Body | 19 |
The Development of Fuke in the Song Dynasty | 59 |
Gestation and Birth in Song Medicine | 94 |
Rethinking Fuke in the Ming Dynasty | 134 |
Fuke and Late Ming Medical Culture | 155 |
Ming Bodies of Generation | 187 |
Narratives of the Clinical Encounter | 224 |
Ming Women as Healing | 266 |
Conclusion | 301 |
CHARACTER GLOSSARY | 331 |
Other editions - View all
A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665 Charlotte Furth No preview available - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
acupuncture Benefit Yin birth Blood and qi bodily chan channels Chen Ziming Cheng Congzhou childbirth Chinese medicine classical clients clinical Cold Damage cultural daixia Daoist Dazheng depletion diagnosis discourse disorders doctors edition Essence fang female healers fertility fetal fetus Five Phases formulas fuke function gender gestational gestational body ginseng granny heat Huangdi neijing human identified illness imperial ingredients Inner Canon Jin ping mei jing juan Kidney late Ming Li Gao Li Shizhen lineage literati male and female menses menstrual midwives Ming dynasty Ministerial Fire mother moxibustion narratives neo-Confucian nourishing obstetrics organ systems pattern physicians postpartum practice pregnancy pulse Qi Zhongfu relationships replenishing reproductive ritual sexual shen sheng social Song strategies Sun Simiao symptoms syndromes tion vitality Wang Qi Wansu woman women Wu Zhiwang Xue Ji Yangzhou Yellow Emperor's body yin and yang yin yang Yuan Huang Yunxian Zhang Zhu Zhenheng