Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China
Ruth Rogaski
Abstract
Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, this book reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as “hygiene,” “sanitary,” “health,” or “public health”—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. ... More
Keywords: weisheng, Tianjin, diet, meditation, self-medication, imperialism, Chinese cosmology, national sovereignty, bodily cleanliness, racial fitness
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2004 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520240018 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: March 2012 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520240018.001.0001 |
