March 4, 2008 Lecture
Kim Taylor: Defending His Territory: Wu Liande and the Control of Cholera in Early Republican China, 1911-37
Dear RAS members and friends:
We are pleased to welcome RAS Council member Dr. Kim Taylor to deliver a talk on the extraordinary contribution made by Dr. Wu Liande to epidemic disease prevention in early 20th century China. Wu Liande (M.A., M.D., Cantab.) (Mast. P.H., Johns Hopkins) is best known for his pioneering work in the introduction of modern measures of public health into China following a severe outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria from 1910-11. He went on to achieve real prominence on the national and international medical scenes as head of the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service (1912-30) and then of the Shanghai-based National Quarantine Service (1930-37). These were turbulent times in Chinese history and the containment of epidemic disease was not merely a health issue but also a visible measure of China’s administrative health. And it was cholera, not plague, which was the prominent, recurring epidemic disease that came to dominate Wu Liande’s public health agenda. As such, non-clinical portrayals of it, such as histories of disease and medical advertising, came to reflect nationalistic sensitivities in which foreign powers were implicated in the introduction of infectious diseases into China. Kim will discuss how cholera served as the means by which Wu Liande was able to remain on the frontline of disease control throughout his prominent career, and the attendant implications of disease control which led to cholera being perceived as an ‘Agent of the West’. Dr. Wu Liande was also a RAS Council member and the financial saviour of the former RAS building that opened in Shanghai in 1933.
Dr. Kim Taylor trained in the History of Chinese Medicine at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. She went on to hold a Wellcome Trust Fellowship at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, a specialist research centre for the history of Chinese science. She is the author of Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China: A Medicine of Revolution (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). Her research interests include the history of disease, medicine and the imperial world, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century Chinese medicine. She is also the founder of Kaimu Productions, a Shanghai-based documentary film production company.
DATE: Tuesday March 4th, 2008
TIME: 7.00 p.m.
PLACE: InterfaceFLOR Room 201 (Second floor), RafflesCity, 268 Central Tibet Road. Entrance to office tower on Yunnan Road. Tel: 63403868
There will be a Rmb 30 charge for RAS members and Rmb 50 charge for non-members.
Peter Hibbard (President) and the RAS China in Shanghai Council