Medical Bilingualism: Reframing the Overlap between Medical Systems in Recent Medical History and Anthropology
Special Issue for “Encounter of Chinese Medicine and Modern Western Medicine in China” in Chinese Medicine and Culture.
Volume 8, Issue 3, published on August 5, 2025.
Article by: Marta Hanson and Victor Kumar
In this open access article, Marta Hanson and Victor Kumar engage with the concept of “medical bilingualism,” which refers to how people draw on and navigate between two distinctly different medical systems: for example, modern biomedicine and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). This term has gained increasing traction among historians and anthropologists of East Asian medicine since Marta Hanson’s 2015 commentary on Tu Youyou’s 屠呦呦 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of artemisinin as a treatment for malaria.
Hanson and Kumar analyze the rise of the term “medical bilingualism” from 2015 as indicative of a scholarly shift towards a more culturally heterogeneous and cosmopolitan picture of medical concepts and practices. First, the article outlines experiments with AI tools to explore the usefulness of using AI in developing a bibliography on “medical bilingualism.” Hanson and Kumar show that while AI engines occasionally provide an inaccurate or even fabricated list of sources related to the term, they are nevertheless reasonably effective in differentiating sources that use the term “medical bilingualism” in different ways.
Second, the article analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the development of the term. Hanson and Kumar show how “medical bilingualism” was applied in different contexts pre-COVID-19, such as for understanding the integration of modern biomedicine with traditional Korean and Japanese medicine. They then explore how the term was more widely used in the post-COVID-19 era as TCM became an integrated medical response to treating patients with the virus in China. The article concludes by reflecting on language ideology, multilingualism, and medical pluralism.
Visit the website of Chinese Medicine and Culture to access the article.
Featured image: A photo in the 1950s of Tu Youyou (屠呦呦, right) and her tutor Lou Zhicen (楼之岑) in a lab in the Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences surrounded by jars filled with Chinese medicinals (from: https://c8.alamy.com/compde/kjercr/tu-youyou-1950-s-kjercr.jpg)