The Case of the Suzhou Hospital of National Medicine (1939-41): War, Medicine, and Eastern Civilization.

This article explores the founding of the Suzhou Hospital of National Medicine in 1939 during the Japanese occupation of Suzhou. We argue that the hospital was the culmination of a period of rich intellectual exchange between traditional Chinese and Japanese physicians in the early twentieth century and provides important insights into the modern development of medicine in both countries. The founding of this hospital was followed closely by leading Japanese Kampo physicians. As the Japanese empire expanded into East Asia, they hoped that they could revitalize their profession at home by disseminating their unique interpretations of the famous Treatise on Cold Damage abroad. The Chinese doctors that founded the Suzhou Hospital of National Medicine were close readers of Japanese scholarship on the Treatise and were inspired to experiment with a Japanese approach to diagnosis, based on new interpretations of the concept of "presentation" (sho / zheng ). Unfortunately, the Sino-Japanese War cut short this fascinating dialogue on reforming medicine and set the traditional medicine professions in both countries on new nationalist trajectories.

The excitations and suppressions of the times: locating the emotions in the liver in modern Chinese medicine.

This paper explores how doctors of Chinese medicine have borrowed from a long history of scholarship on the problem of "constraint" to develop treatments for modern emotion-related disorders, such as depression. I argue that this combining of medical practices was made possible by a complex sequence of events. First, doctors in the 1920 and 1930s were engaged in a critical reexamination of the entire corpus of Chinese medical knowledge. Spurred by the encounter with European imperialism, the sudden rise of Japan as a new power in East Asia, and the political struggles to establish a Chinese nation state, these scholars were among the first to speculate on the possible relationship between Chinese medicine and Western medicine. Second, in the 1950 and 1960s, doctors like other intellectuals were focused on national reunification and institution building. They rejected some of the experimental claims of their predecessors to focus on identifying the key characteristics of Chinese medicine, such as the methodology of "pattern recognition and treatment determination bianzheng lunzhi." The flexibility of the new bianzheng lunzhi paradigm allowed doctors to quietly adopt innovations from their early twentieth century counterparts that they ostensibly rejected, ultimately paving the way for contemporary treatments of depression.

Chinese medicine in action: on the postcoloniality of medical practice in China.

Since the early twentieth century, there has been strong opposition to Chinese medicine within Chinese society. Critics have attacked Chinese medicine as unscientific and a hindrance to the development of the nation. I argue that doctors of Chinese medicine have responded to this charge by developing a "postcolonial" form of medicine that is based on the celebrated methodology of "pattern recognition and treatment determination bianzheng lunzhi [image omitted]." I show that bianzheng lunzhi plays two contradictory roles in everyday clinical practice, distinguishing the uniqueness of Chinese medicine from biomedicine while providing a technology for integrating these two medical practices. Through the close examination of a typical medical case, I show how these dual processes of purification and hybridization have become the central dynamic in the postcolonial transformation of Chinese medicine.