A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665

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This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke, or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres, it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders. Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.

Reader Reviews:

A very informative text and source book on the history and practice of woman's health and healing in ancient China. Her scholarship is immaculate and her insight into the "Yellow Emperor's Body" showed the distinction between sex and gender. She traces the development of TCM treatment of woman's illness and how it becomes essential. That very early on, the Chinese Doctor are aware of the difference between woman and man in their similar sickness. A good resource for all woman Qigong and Taiji students as well as their teachers. This book also deal with the basics of the Chinese medical concept of vital fluid of blood, Jing/Creative essence, and Shen/ the Spirit, and the developmental stages of the woman's life cycles.
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Dao of Chinese Medicine : Understanding an Ancient Healing Art

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