Call for papers: History of Western Medicine in China, 1835-1950

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Call for Papers Indiana University, Indianapolis June 15-16, 2012.

Indiana University (Indianapolis) will host the first of two conferences* aimed to increase understanding of Western medicine (xiyi in Chinese) in modern China in the pre-Maoist period. We invite conference papers to examine the establishment of this new medicine which left archives tracing new directions in the health of China?s women, children and men, patient-physician relationships, and conflicting and merging theories and practices of healing.

We wish to encourage the growing scholarship in this field with basic institutional research and broader topics in the social and cultural history of health and medicine. Understudied topics in the field include: hospital-based studies of specific diseases; the rise of medical leaders trained in China; Japanese and European influence in various periods; the role of military medicine, and of medicine in war; change and continuity of specific institutions that merged or were abandoned; racial medicine, anthropometry and physical anthropology among physicians; missionary physicians and Chinese physicians abroad as two-way conduits of global and local medical knowledge; and cooperation and conflict in Chinese and foreign medical philanthropy. Despite recent advances, the field of possible topics is still extremely broad; paper proposals on these and other topics are welcome. Selected conference papers will be included in a peer-reviewed, edited volume.

We welcome proposals from both established scholars and senior graduate students. Please submit an abstract of 250 words, along with a brief CV, no later than December 1, 2011. Inquiries and abstracts can be directed to David Luesink: [email protected], Phone: (317) 274-4740

PRC Scholars: We have funding set aside for travel and research costs for a small number of junior scholars from the PRC who have not had a chance to access North American archives. For scholars from the PRC, please include a separate statement of 150 words describing which North American archives related to medicine in China you would like to use and how these would fit into your research.

*Indiana University and its co-sponsor, the Peking University Health Science Center, have been funded with a major three-year grant (2011-2013) from the Henry Luce Foundation to support this project on the history and archives of Western medicine in China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For more on the project and conference, please see: http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/wmicproject Conference Organizer: David Luesink, Ph.D. (Cand.), Research Associate, Medical Humanities Program, IUPUI