Suchergebnisse

Prologue in triptych -- Introduction -- Policing the public in the new capital -- Appearing in public : the relationships at the heart of the nation -- Healing to kill the true internal enemy -- Authority in the halls of science : women of the wards -- Mothers for the nation -- Conclusion

When China's War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout the country. In the end, China not only survived the war but also emerged from the trauma with a curious strength. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites' conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country that transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

When China's War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout the country. In the end, China not only survived the war but also emerged from the trauma with a curious strength. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites' conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country that transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

The Chongqing Bureau of Public Health, established shortly after the Nationalists relocated to the wartime capital, faced frequent air raids, rampant inflation, and acute personnel shortages. Still it accomplished an astonishing amount of work, demonstrating its commitment to public health as a barometer of modernity, national stability, and political fitness. The Bureau also treated male and female bodies differently, institutionalizing gender roles through its public health administration. This paper illustrates differences between medical care for men and women, arguing that Chongqing health officials' myopic focus on maternal issues when discussing women's healthcare, their failure to address highly skewed gender ratios in the patient reports and vaccination statistics that their office received on a monthly basis, and the relatively late opening of the city's most substantial maternal health facilities, all point to male-centric priorities within the administration. Military health took priority not only because of the war, but because soldiers' health conditions and facilities were so appallingly dismal. Thus, wartime health conditions reveal the continued haunting of modern China's great specter, the "Sick Man of East Asia," and two types of disease in the wartime capital: the Nationalist state, politically diseased, failed to protect its civilians and soldiers from common diseases.

On July 7, 1939 Japan's Imperial Army sparked an 8-year war against China with a battle at Lugouqiao (Marco Polo Bridge) near Beiping. The Japanese army then began invading cities all along the eastern coast of China, and by December 1937 the capital Nanjing fell. The first provisional capital, Wuhan, fell in October 1938. The Nationalist Government then moved further inland to the city of Chongqing in Sichuan province [show maps & explain strategic location]. For the remainder of the war, Chongqing was subject to a total of 268 air raids from Japanese bombers, which targeted civilian residences, business districts, schools, and hospitals. There is no conclusive tally of the numbers of people killed and wounded in Chongqing throughout the war, but the existing records are staggering.