Che-chia Chang 張哲嘉

Partner

Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Working group: Digital Humanities

Chang Che-chia is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. He earned his PhD in 1998 with a dissertation examining the relationship between physicians and patients in the Late Qing palace from 1874 to 1908. Since then, he has explored various facets of medical history in China and Japan, including pharmaceuticals, medical education, astrological medicine, forensic medicine, and the human body. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at several prestigious institutions, such as the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and the IKGF at Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. In 2008, he received the “Zhu Kezhen Award” from the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine for his paper titled “The Myth of Rhubarb: The Strategic Rationale and Cultural Implications of China’s Prohibitions on the Export of Rhubarb to Britain and Russia in the Qing Period.” Since 2011, he has overseen the management  of digital databases at his institute and  developed a linked set of databases for modern Chinese  history, known as  MHDB (Modern History DataBase). Currently, he is working on building a database of traditional Chinese medicine journals for his institute, in collaboration with the National Research Institute of Chinese Medicine, Taiwan.