Afterword: Western Medicine and Global Health

Summary

A main goal of this volume has been to show how China-based developments in Western medicine incorporated China as an integral site in the creation of global biomedicine. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Western Europe developed an approach to medicine based on new scientific discoveries that had a global application by the beginning of the twentieth century. Gao Xi provides a case study of this development in her chapter on Patrick Manson and the medical missionaries in China beginning in the 1870s, but there are myriad examples of this from China and elsewhere. At the end of the century, Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo Kitasato made their dramatic discoveries of the cause of bubonic plague while working in Hong Kong; and before the outbreak of World War I, the Manchurian Plague Prevention Service hosted research by a team of international scholars. Other early global biomedical research included Ronald Ross's work on malaria in India, which won international notoriety (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1902), as did the research of Alphonse Laveran in Algeria (Nobel Prize 1907). Algeria was also where Charles Nicolle made his discovery of the cause of typhus in 1912 (Nobel Prize 1928). In Brazil Oswaldo Cruz established an institute at the beginning of the twentieth century modeled on the Pasteur Institute, where he had trained.

This afterword looks at the history of Western medicine in China from the perspective of today's global health concerns. Comparing contemporary efforts to improve health for all can help in understanding the growth of Western medicine in China, which typically has been studied as an arm of imperial domination or the inevitable growth of Western science. Likewise, this history of Western medicine in China can help to understand global health today if it is studied as a precursor or early example whose similarities and differences help clarify what is new and what is a continuation of earlier efforts.

Any examination of global health and the history of medicine in China begins with the question of what is meant by global health. The problem is that the concept is not very well defined, nor is there much common agreement.