Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Howard Y. F. Choy -- Introduction: Disease and Discourse / Howard Y. F. Choy -- James Henderson’s Shanghai Hygiene and the British Constitution in Early Modern China / Stephanie Villalta Puig -- Curing Unhappiness in Revolutionary China: Optimism under Socialism and Capitalism / Wendy Larson -- Metaphors unto Themselves: Mental Illness Poetics and Narratives in Contemporary Chinese Poetry / Birgit Bunzel Linder -- Unmaking of Nationalism: Drug Addiction and Its Literary Imagination in Bi Shumin’s Novel / Haomin Gong -- Narrative as Therapy: Stories of Breast Cancer by Bi Shumin and Xi Xi / Howard Y. F. Choy -- Narrating Cancer, Disabilities, and aids: Yan Lianke’s Trilogy of Disease / Shelley W. Chan -- Reluctant Transcendence: aids and the Catastrophic Condition in Gu Changwei’s Film Love for Life / Kun Qian -- Alone Together: Contagion, Stigmatization and Utopia as Therapy in Zhao Liang’s aids Documentary Together / Li Li -- The Unknown Virus: The Social Logic of Bio-conspiracy Theories in Contemporary China / Kevin Carrico -- Index / Howard Y. F. Choy.

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The meanings of disease have undergone such drastic changes with the introduction of modern Western medicine into China during the last two hundred years that new discourses have been invented to theorize illness, redefine health, and reconstruct classes and genders. As a consequence, medical literature is rewritten with histories of hygiene, studies of psychopathology, and stories of cancer, disabilities and pandemics. This edited volume includes studies of discourses about both bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together ground-breaking scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of the “Sick Man of East Asia” through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.