Pathology Between China And The West - 1873 Words

Pathology Between China and the West and the Crisis of the Chinese Identity So the book I decided to do for my book review is The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body Between China and the West. In the introduction of the book the author finds it important to state how she came to the point on writing the book. As the author was working in the National Palace Museum researching representations of pathology in modern art, a colleague pointed out a picture in showed a boy with smallpox. The picture was part of an exhibition at the time called â€Å"Comparison of Chinese and World Cultures†. In this exhibit there were two timelines; a Chinese and Western one. The aim of both timelines was to form a visual comparison of†¦show more content†¦In other words an image that was used in order to be able to properly diagnose and contain the disease through inoculation and that was a symbol of technological prowess in the eyes of the Chinese had become a symbol for underdevelopment, as the Chinese came to be identified with a vulnerabil ity to disease. The goal of this book is to trace the development and the origins of the various medical iconographies that ended up connecting the Chinese identity with illness subjugation at the dawn of modernity. By doing so, it tries to point the various outlines of the varied contexts in which the meanings of medical representations were created and transformed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It focuses on the medical rhetoric, the study and application of persuasive language and symbols in medicine, and the iconography of missionaries in China that brought back to the West this perception of a sick China or otherwise known as â€Å"Sick Man of Asia† (Heinrich, pg 4). Furthermore, it also studies how these ideas found their way back to China through missionaries, early translations of Western medical texts to Chinese, and through Chinese literature itself. Ultimately, it not only tries to point out the importance