Western anthelmintics in early twentieth‐century China
Colonial practices and knowledge on “tropical diseases” of the In/between
Publication date
2024-11-02
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Organisational unit
Publisher
Wiley
Series or journal
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
ISSN
Periodical volume
47
Periodical issue
4
First page
330
Last page
351
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
Protestant (medical) missionaries were the main proponents of Western medicine in China after the Opium Wars. Several studies have highlighted how they used spectacular surgery as a means of gaining public trust. As well as surgery, they also administered anthelmintic drugs such as santonin as a tool of persuasion and conversion. Many anthelmintic drugs of the European materia medica had a colonial history. My paper analyses how coloniality materialised in medical practice and anthelmintics in China. For the late nineteenth century, I will examine the colonial practices in which the drug santonin was involved. At the time, santonin was the drug of choice for treating roundworm. In the early twentieth century, medical missionaries became involved in parasitological research on parasitic worms such as hookworm and Fasciolopsis buski . For this period, I will explore how new knowledge about anthelmintics emerged in the scattered knowledge space of China, and how it related to colonialism and imperialism.
Description
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Version
Published version
Access right on openHSU
Metadata only access
Open Access Funding
Wiley (DEAL)