TY - JOUR
AU - Wu, Emily, S
AB - In the years of research and writing of Herb and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Market Place, Tamara Venit Shelton may not have anticipated how extremely timely her work is during the Covid-19 Pandemic.The seemingly sudden rise of anti-Chinese sentiment in 2020 is yet another wave from over two centuries of complicated international and domestic cross-cultural politics. Based on a rich collection of primary sources, Shelton reconstructs a history of American medicine as it intersects with Chinese American history—not a history that perpetuates the stereotype of Chinese doctors as perpetual foreigners—starting from the late Eighteenth century to the present. Herbs and Roots is a well-written, informative read. Shelton starts with how eighteenth-century European fascination with the exotic East prepared an Orientalist context for the doctors in the Chinese immigrant community in the mid-nineteenth century. Historically, Chinese doctors capitalize on Orientalist logic and symbols to attract patients, and navigate the American legal system and legislature to legitimize their medical practices. Shelton argues that historians have mostly ignored that, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “Chinese medical knowledge, materia medica, and practitioners helped give meaning to the assemblage of theories and practices that became characteristic of Western-style scientific medicine” (p. 11). In this history, as Western scientific medicine rise to its prominence as standard and “regular” medicine in a pluralistic medical marketplace, Chinese medicine becomes one of the important “irregular” referential competitors. To this day, generations of Chinese doctors, whether they train and practice traditional Chinese medicine, Western scientific medicine, or integrated medicine, continue to participate in shaping the medical landscape by de-Orientalizing—as medical practitioners and as Chinese ethnics. This book provides a decolonizing, global model for understanding American medical history, where Western scientific medicine is decentralized and not taken as the given standard. It is an important paradigm shift that historians and other scholars of medicine must consider, if they have not already done so. Shelton’s eloquent writing also makes the book accessible for general audiences to understand the historical development of anti-immigrant/anti-Chinese narratives in the U.S. context. In a time when a pandemic reignites deeply rooted racism in our nation, Shelton offers a historian’s remedy for restoring the balance—by healing the story of the Chinese doctors. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Western History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace. By Tamara Venit Shelton
JF - Western Historical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/whq/whaa109
DA - 2020-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/herbs-and-roots-a-history-of-chinese-doctors-in-the-american-medical-JI32jPKdMf
SP - 487
EP - 488
VL - 51
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -