C. Michele Thompson

While reshaping our understanding of the history and development of traditional Vietnamese medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, Michele Thompson's new book reaches across disciplines to open important perspectives in Vietnamese colonial and social history as well as our understanding of the Vietnamese language and writing systems. Traditional Vietnamese medicine is generally understood as an import from the Chinese tradition: Thompson's detailed historical and linguistic research restores agency and voice to practitioners of Vietnamese medicine, showing how the adoption of Chinese and then Western ideas of medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries relied on indigenous Vietnamese concepts of health and the human body. She mines medical manuscripts in Chinese and in Nom (vernacular Vietnamese) to capture various aspects of the historical interaction between Chinese and Vietnamese thought. She presents a detailed analysis of the Vietnamese response to a Chinese medical technique for preventing smallpox, and to the medical concepts associated with it, looking at Vietnamese healers from a variety of social classes. Thompson's account brings together colorful historical vignettes, contemporary observations and interviews, and textual analysis. It stands out as a demonstration of the power of the history of medicine to illuminate adjacent fields of enquiry. It will be of interest to historians of medicine globally and in East Asia, as well as to students of Vietnam and its complex process of modernization.

A Social History

Vietnamese Traditional Medicine

Laurence Monnais

Ayo Wahlberg

What is a national medicine? What does it mean for a medicine to be traditional and scientific at the same time? How could a specifically Vietnamese medicine emerge out of the medical practices and treatments that have flourished and waned during key socio-cultural encounters in Vietnam? This book answers these questions by examining the making of Vietnamese medicine from a historical and contemporary perspective. Ever since its fourteenth century emergence out of the traditions and practices of the much more globally celebrated Chinese medicine, Vietnamese medicine has been engaged in a constant effort to define, guard and more recently, revive itself. In this collection of empirically-rich chapters, international scholars specialising in history, sociology, anthropology and medicine show how this process has played out through very much ongoing North-South and West-East encounters. Vietnamese medicine is practiced, produced and consumed in contexts of medical pluralism and globalisation, not only within Vietnam, but increasingly also among the Vietnamese diaspora around the world. Its development and modernisation cannot be detached from Vietnam’s tumultuous and tragic quest for independence. The compass points that saturate every chapter in this volume suggest that the making of Vietnamese medicine has been as much related to post-colonial national identity formation as it has to national efforts to address the health problems of the Vietnamese people.

C. Michele Thompson

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