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University of California Press
Open Access

Intimate Communities

Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945

by Nicole Elizabeth Barnes (Author)
Price: $12.99 / £10.99
Publication Date: Oct 2018
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 324
ISBN: 9780520971868
Trim Size: 6 x 9

About the Book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

About the Author

Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. 
 
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue in Triptych

Introduction
1. Policing the Public in the New Capital
2. Appearing in Public: The Relationships at the Heart of the Nation
3. Healing to Kill the True Internal Enemy
4. Authority in the Halls of Science: Women of the Wards
5. Mothers for the Nation
Conclusion

Notes
Glossary of Personal Names and Terms
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

"Nicole Elizabeth Barnes demonstrates remarkable insights into some of the most well-known figures in health care in wartime China—and introduces many previously unknown—providing pointed character analyses while also connecting individual experiences to larger socio-political trends across the tumultuous wartime landscape."—Sonya Grypma, PhD, RN, author of China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community. 

"Tackling head-on the challenge to show women’s agency in the history of public health, Barnes tells a fascinating story about how Chinese women transformed themselves through medicine and thereby helped create an emotional community for the Chinese nation in the midst of a devastating war. Intimate Communities is not only a major contribution to the histories of medicine, gender, emotion, and nationalism, but even more importantly, it opens up exciting horizons by making visible and exploring the surprising entanglements between them all."—Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, author of Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity
 

 
 

Awards

  • William H. Welch Award 2020 2020, American Association for the History of Medicine
  • Joan Kelly Memorial Prize 2019 2019, American Historical Association