Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China

Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes

by Ruth Rogaski

Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski 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. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.

Genres: History, China, Nonfiction, Grad School

418 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Ruth Rogaski is a historian who specializes in the history of science, medicine, and the environment in China.

Reviews

[Benemint · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was tired of reading dictionary-like Japanese history books and felt lost about what I was doing in academia. I needed some inspiration. I'm glad I grabbed this book in the library -- Rogaski totally pulled me back to the excitement of doing history. It also gave me a luxury time of reading something unrelated to my work, one chapter at a time, like eating a small piece of chocolate between meals, during the bath time, before the bedtime, and between my sources.

Her usage of Tianjin as a site is a great model to those of us who do local histories. Her research has geographical width (moving from China to Britain to Japan) and chronological depth (going over the Confucius scholarship and giving references to current China). I learned that readers of the outside field like me actually appreciate the width and depth even if she had to depend a lot on secondary sources.

Her work is also super entertaining. I most appreciate her willingness to fill the gap between the sources with her own imaginations that give rich pictures of people's real lives there.

I also liked how she tightens up her points and implications in the intro and conclusion of each chapter. It's hard to find model conclusions in history books -- I'll definitely come back to her book to learn how she does it.

[casey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for History 103F: a History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern East Asia with Professor Stacey Van Vleet. The proseminar series serves as an introduction to some dimension of the history of a nation, region, people, culture, institution, or historical phenomenon. The goal is for students to come to understand, and develop an appreciation for: the origins and evolution of the people, cultures, and/or political, economic, and/or social institutions of a particular region(s) of the world. They may explore how human encounters shaped individual and collective identities and the political, economic, and social orders of the region/nation/communities under study.
-
This seminar introduces the history of science, medicine and technology in modern East Asia—mainly China, Japan, Korea, and their inland and maritime peripheries—between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. The first half of the course examines the reconfiguration in understandings of the body and the natural world, as well as the politics of medicine and technology, during the transition from the early modern to the modern period. The second half puts this East Asian reconfiguration into global perspective over the last century. A central goal will be to explore different methodological approaches including traditional history of science, social history, post-colonial studies, gender, translation studies, and material culture.
-
Dr. Rogaski's monograph on 衛生 as conceptualised as hygienic modernity is a really compelling read on the development of hygiene, national sciences, colonialism, and the influence of both human and physical geography on shaping public health. I originally only intended to read excerpts of Rogaski's book as part of class discussions, while writing my final paper I ended up perusing its entirety. I found the geographical focus on Tianjin as a case study of hyper-colonialism within China as a semi-colonial nation to be a particularly interesting method of documenting the manifold stories -- from that of colonist, elite technocrat, to street urchin -- to be found converging and diverging from one another within the urban environment.

[Rolin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A history of the term 卫生 — "Guarding Health" or "Hygienic modernity" depending on the time period it was used in. Rogaski looks at the tensions and interactions between Western colonizing notions of public health and what the Chinese locals of Tianjin thought and experienced at the turn of the 20th Century. The book is a mix of medical history, urban history and translational studies — a pure delight to read that offers a nuanced, complex and lively narrative of individual, societal and national health in a semicolonial environment.

As Rogaski herself puts it in her beautifully written introduction, "a local history approach facilitates the simultaneous consideration of both the mundane (if not profane) and the sublime: it investigates where people went to the bathroom as well as how people envisioned the nation."

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be one of my favorite monographs ever, which surprises me because it's about public health, a topic that I don't normally engage much with. Rogaski writes so engagingly (a difficult feat for an academic work), and her research gives broad context and thorough treatment to the evolution of the idea of public health in the Chinese city of Tianjin over time. So, so fascinating, and perhaps a very relevant read for these current pandemic times. I expect to refer to this book again and again.

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rogaski frames this book around the concept of weisheng, which among its many meanings, refers to hygiene. Rogaski traces the emergence of this concept as not only individual and familial choices made in the everyday but also a concept critical to the state, politics, and social life. The transformation of weisheng involved colonial interactions, state actors, and individual people seeking to modernize and improve their life through health.

[Xiaoran Chen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ruth, my goddess

[Naked Fish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rogaski has completed a groundbreaking scholarship on the development and reconfiguration of a simple but meaningful concept in late imperial and modern China. Drawing upon multiple approaches (medical history, colonial medicine, local social history, cultural history, discourse analysis, translation studies etc.) and theoretical frameworks (Foucault and post-colonialism), the book traces the changed meanings and connotations of "weisheng" (sanitary or hygiene) and shows how a segment of Chinese elite critiqued, adapted, and ultimately utilized the concept to identify themselves as "modern" and transform the landscape of a city. "Weisheng" in the 20th century no longer denoted personal healthcare and sanitary behaviors but a set of knowledge and practices that cured individual bodies, organized governments, and ordered society. It was also closely related to the discourse of "Chinese deficiency" and backwardness. The last two chapters are less satisfactory. The final chapter could discuss a bit more about how the new PRC regime reverse the use of "weisheng" to resist American imperialism instead of only focusing on conventional narrative of public health campaigns and regulations. But overall the book is well-argued and written, illustrating a new way of writing the history of modern China. It still appears in the bibliographies of recent scholarship: few can avoid talking about it.

[Nicole Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the hottest books in Chinese history in the last few years, and the rather young (for a professor) Ruth Rogaski won a couple prizes for it. She both deconstructs and constructs the history of a single term, "weisheng" (translatable as 'public health,' 'hygiene, 'guarding life'...etc.) from the perspective of turn-of-the-century Tianjin (at the time one of the treaty ports that had several chunks for foreign residents carved out of it and now a huge industrial city east of Beijing). If there was a space for attachments here I could attach my academic review of it, but alas...

[John Harney · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a good book for grad students to read, although it is surprisingly readable for real people too. She does over-egg the impact of hygiene in Chinese modernization a little (well it is the main thesis of the book) and she invokes the dreaded Foucault. But all in all, really good.

[Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex book that traverses a lot of ground, with a lot of great stories of medical practices in Tianjin. Rogaski is able to incorporate complex theoretical analysis with narrative detail to great effect.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome!

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this a couple years back. One of the most compelling books on medicinal development in east Asia.