Medical Humanities | Medicine in the Southern Margins of the Qing Empire

You are cordially invited to a seminar organized by the School of Humanities' Medical Humanities Cluster:

Medicine in the Southern Margins of the Qing Empire: Sources, Actors, Knowledge  

In this lecture, I will examine what it meant to work in medicine in late imperial China, what kind of actors were involved in healing and what kind of knowledge, of practices, these actors conveyed and circulated. In contrast with a historiography, which has mostly considered these questions by focusing on the great cultural center of the time, Jiangnan, I deliberately choose to focus on what was considered as the southern margins of the Qing Empire, including the present provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guangdong. Instead of considering the social or the intellectual features of one individual, in particular, I try to consider those of the wide range of people who were known to be involved in medicine in this specific geographical and chronological framework.  In the lecture, I will firstly say some words on the genre of sources that allow such an analysis, highlighting equally the specific biases of these sources. Then, by examining a set of hundreds of biographies as well as the set of medical treatises which have been written in this specific framework and that have survived today in Chinese libraries, I will shed some light on the social and cultural features of the actors who were involved in medicine in this area. Considering together the twenty of medical texts that have survived, I will notably analyze what it meant for such actors to write medical texts in this time and place. I will also examine to what extent the medical ideas and practices conveyed in this time and place were local and to what extent the different debates that occurred in the cultural center of Jiangnan were known, agreed, contested, or readapted by authors living and working in the southern margins of the empire.

Speaker Profile

Florence Bretelle-Establet is a senior researcher in SPHERE team (UMR 7219, CNRS & Université Paris Diderot). Since her PhD (1998), which had focused on the establishment of French colonial medicine in southern China, she works on the history of medicine in late imperial China, with a certain global consciousness. Author of La santé en Chine du Sud, 1898-1928 (2002), she has widely published on the history of medicine in the Far South of China. She has edited several books, including Looking at It from Asia: The processes that Shaped the Sources of History of Science (2010) and Pieces and Parts in Scientific Texts (co-edited with With Stephane Schmitt, 2018). With Romain Graziani, she has been the chief editor of the journal Extrême-Orient Extrême Occident (2005-2015). 

Refreshments to follow the seminar.