Book review of Marta Hanson. Speaking of Epidemics: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China. London and New York: Routledge, Needham Research Institute Series. 265p.dans East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, (2012) 6(4), p. 585-588
Résumé
Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicineis the latest book by Marta Hanson,
historian of Chinese science and medicine at the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. This book draws on her PhD dissertation and on the
many research projects that have followed it. It
explores the Chinese medical discourse on epidemics in Chinese history and highlights the changes and bifurcations of this discourse elaborated not only in the face of a
changing epidemiological reality but also of shifting political, social, economic, and
cultural realities which have always played a significant part in the conceptualization
of the body and its ailments. To capture the different tenets of this discourse, Hanson
focuses on one disease concept, “warm disease” (wenbing温病), that Chinese authors
linked to epidemics in the most ancient medical texts and examines how the diseases
associated with this label have been considered, treated, and described by the Chinese
doctors throughout Chinese history.