The follow-up meeting of the group “Medicine & Health in Mao's China: A Global History Approach”–––part of the China-Kolleg and supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes–––took place in Tübingen. The event brought together students from Heidelberg, Munich, Münster, and Würzburg to collaboratively explore perspectives on China’s medical landscapes.

Dr. Andrea Kifyasi shared his first-hand experiences accessing archives in both China and Tanzania, offering insights into transnational research practices. Dr. David Luesink’s talk took the group back to the Republican era, when dissection was first introduced and institutionalized as a scientific method for acquiring anatomical knowledge in China. His presentation shed light on what Chinese medical students encountered in the dissection room during this transformative period.

In the ideas workshop on “E-Health in China,” participants reflected on historical insights and discussed their relevance to current developments in artificial intelligence, digital health, and intelligent healthcare in contemporary China. This session bridged the historical and the modern, encouraging critical reflection on both continuity and change in China's medical landscapes.

PUBLIC LECTURE / FREE ENTRANCE

This talk is based on a chapter of a larger book, “The Body Anatomic and the Body Politic in Modern China,” about the institutionalization of anatomy as the basis for a powerful new form of medicine in China rooted in a relationship between state power and a regulated and standardized medical profession. Following a chapter describing the efforts to establish an anatomy law in the new Republic of China after 1912, this chapter argues that the body anatomic would be constructed first in the dissection room. The dissection room was a brand-new kind of space that had never existed in China. In this space young women and men in a medical program would as a matter of course encounter the bodies of the dead. A new type of relationship between the living student and the corpse of the dead anatomy subjects would be formed in the dissection room where a student would have to come to terms with feelings of fear, disgust, and empathy as day after day they would plunge their scalpel through skin and bone and tissue uncovering the secrets that the dead could tell the living about normal and pathological anatomy. Chinese medical students encountering the bodies of the dead for the first time left behind traces of this encounter that are explored in this chapter through first person narratives, poetry, and photographs. The chapter will focus on three personal accounts of student dissection, each remarkable as dissection writing and each revealing the preoccupations of Chinese anatomy students engaged in cutting up a dead body for the first time.

David Luesink is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, U.S.A. He is a historian of modern China with interests in the history of medicine, public health, and science. He has published articles on medicine and anatomy in China, edited a volume called China and the Globalization of Biomedicine (2019), and is completing a book manuscript on the history of anatomy in China that explores how new knowledge of the human body was connected to technologies of state making. Other ongoing research projects explore China’s first scientific laboratory and its research on plague, and a book on the significance of the standardization of scientific terminology for medical and scientific professionalization in China and the imbrication of these professions in state power.

PUBLIC LECTURE / FREE ENTRANCE

This lecture will explore the methodological opportunities and challenges that researchers encounter while studying China’s engagements with African countries, as well as their implications for knowledge production. The speaker will share personal experiences to highlight what we know and do not know, along with strategies for navigating the hurdles.

Dr. Andrea Azizi Kifyasi is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the Department of History, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He holds a BA in Education and an MA in History from the University of Dar es Salaam, an MA in Chinese Studies from Zhejiang University, China, and a PhD in History from the University of Basel, Switzerland. Currently, he is a Research Fellow at Kate Hamburger Research Centre, Global Dis:connect, Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU), Munich, Germany. Kifyasi’s main research area is China-Africa relations, specifically on China’s medical aid to post-colonial African countries. Other research areas include medical history and Cold War politics.