Transmitted secrets: The doctors of the lower Yangzi region and popular gynecology in late imperial China

What did people in late imperial China think about women's illnesses, and how was this knowledge created, legitimated, and transmitted? My dissertation addresses these issues by analyzing the lives, activities, and writings of five medical lineages from the lower Yangzi region who were famous for their skills in treating women's diseases. The dissertation focuses primarily on two lineages from the prefecture of Shaoxing: the monks of the Bamboo Grove Monastery and the Qian family. Beginning in the late eighteenth century and all during the nineteenth century, popular self-help gynecological handbooks attributed to these two lineages circulated widely throughout China. Drawing on these texts and other medical works, local histories, and literary collections, my dissertation presents case histories of these lineages and uses them as vehicles to examine Chinese attitudes towards women's medicine and health care.;The first part of the dissertation examines the traditional social and medical context in which doctors such as the Bamboo Grove monks and the Qians lived and worked. It begins by analyzing the medical and social values that doctors used to legitimate themselves as healers, contrasting the ideals associated with "lineage doctors" (shiyi) and "Confucian-scholar doctors" (ruyi). The place of medical specialism within the classical medical tradition is also addressed in depth. The second part of the dissertation presents detailed case studies of the Bamboo Grove Monastery, the Qian family, and the texts that bore their names. Two main themes are highlighted: the interplay between classical and popular medical practices, and the persistent importance of self-dosing and household-based medicine as strategies for managing women's illnesses. The dissertation also examines the ailments and cures described in the Bamboo Grove and Qian works to explore how learned ideas about women's diseases were transformed for popular consumption. Finally, the concluding section of the dissertation explores how the social and political reform movements in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century China transformed the social and medical meanings assigned to lineage practice and proprietary gynecological knowledge.