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Concepts of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infancy in Ch'ing Dynasty China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Charlotte Furth
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Extract

I deas about gender organize the social relations between men and women. They gain their power because they seem to be the products of a natural order of things, deeper than any social conventions. Reproductive processes, like eating and drinking, sickness and death, appear as part of the biological substratum of human experience, operating according to universal laws that apply to all human beings and to other living creatures as well. Older practitioners of the history of science, when confronted with the bewildering variety of customs, rituals, and medical aids surrounding childbirth in remote times and places, usually recorded these as superstition or the products of naive empiricism. The consequent interpretation of the history of medicine as the gradual replacement of error by science retains its positivist appeal even today.

Type
Women in Qing Period China—A Symposium
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 7 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1987

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References

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