ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the lead from historian Joan Scott’s advocacy of adopting gender as a ‘useful category of analysis’, so as to shed light on what a gender approach has contributed, and might further contribute, to historical investigations of Chinese medicine. To this end, a number of feminist historiographies of medicine for women are reviewed, with the particular focus on studies investigating the ways in which sexed bodies have been brought into coherence and crisis within the context of Chinese medicine from the early imperial period to the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). It is suggested that at the heart of these feminist re-interpretations of the rich repertoire of knowledge and practices of Chinese medicine lies a heightened sensitivity to the problems of the Chinese medical construct of sexed binary.
