Over the past decade and a half, there has been a sea change in the history of medicine, but until recently it has barely touched studies of East Asia. Charles Rosenberg and Janet Golden's Framing Disease (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992) and Robert Aronowitz's Making Sense of Illness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) introduced the framework that has since become indispensable for historians of disease: to properly understand a disease, scholars must pay attention to its cultural history as well as its biological life cycle. Since then, disease biography has become a subgenre of medical history: since 2007, Johns Hopkins University Press, Oxford University Press, and Greenwood Press have all launched “Biographies of Disease” series. Scholars have devoted comparatively little attention, however, to how cultural meanings of Chinese disorders changed over time. Marta Hanson's Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine helps to remedy that neglect by applying the...
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