Discourses of Disease

Book excerpt: The meanings of disease have undergone such drastic changes with the introduction of modern Western medicine into China during the last two hundred years that new discourses have been invented to theorize illness, redefine health, and reconstruct classes and genders. As a consequence, medical literature is rewritten with histories of hygiene, studies of psychopathology, and stories of cancer, disabilities and pandemics. This edited volume includes studies of discourses about both bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together ground-breaking scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of the “Sick Man of East Asia” through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.