The Alchemy of Medicine: Making Doctors, Knowledge, and Drugs in Treaty-Port Shanghai, 1915-1927

This project investigates not the inexplicable cures that healed the sick in early 20th-century China, but the transformations in the hierarchies of knowledge on which Western medical authority was based. I look at simultaneously existing paradigms of authority surrounding doctors of Western medicine, scientific medical knowledge, and Chinese herbal medicine in the print media of 1920s Shanghai. The historical confluence of challenges to Chinese medicine and the rise of Western medicine are the backdrop of this story. The fall of the last dynasty in 1911 prompted Chinese reformers to question their guiding paradigms in all areas of life, including language and politics, science and medicine. Intellectuals like Liang Qichao condemned traditional Chinese culture, which was seen as weakening China in the face of foreign imperialism. Chinese medicine however, was not completely repudiated. For all the harsh criticism of Chinese theories of knowing the body based on concepts like yin yang, and methods of diagnosis such as pulse reading, in areas of treatment, herbal and mineral especially, doctors and patients still viewed their native medicine as retaining some value. For prior to the rise of medical schools in the mid-19th century and lab-based biomedicine in the mid-20th century, doctors of Western medicine – often portrayed as charlatans hawking unproven nostrums – struggled to respond effectively to diseases. I ask how Chinese doctors of Western medicine in Shanghai made a case for themselves as figures of authority at a time when Western medicine was ascendant yet could not offer reliable cures for many of the major diseases of the time. Drawing on professional medical journals, popular newspapers, and legal regulations, I show how physicians presented themselves as ethical professionals; how medical journals turned subjective experience into objective scientific knowledge; and the ways professional, popular, and state reporting transformed authoritative herbs into efficacious drugs. The forms of institutional organization and knowledge production that created this medical authority simultaneously produced a whole host of tensions: between professional ethics and medical entrepreneurship; scientific knowledge that was locally contingent but sought to be globally coherent; and between authentic and commodified indigenous medicine. I argue that a particular formation of Sino-Western medicine, knowledge production, and the market in Republican Shanghai resulted in print media restructuring hierarchies of knowledge production to hinge less on asserting the inherent qualities of medical experts, knowledge, or drugs, and more on articulating the institutional processes that validated claims as an expert physician, producer of medical knowledge, and purveyor of effective medical treatments