Marta Hanson 韓嵩
Collaborator
Johns Hopkins University – Department of the History of Medicine
Working group: Local Practices
Marta Hanson publishes widely on the history of medicine in China, early modern Sino-European medical exchanges, and public health in East Asia. She has a PhD from the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. She was Assistant Professor of late imperial Chinese history at UCSD (1997-2004) and then Associate Professor of East Asian medical history at Johns Hopkins University (2004-2021). She is currently the German PI, with Stéphanie Homola as the French PI, for an ANR-DFG funded three-year project on “Knowing Hands: Chinese Hand-memory techniques and handy knowledge in situ, comparison, and contact” (2025-2028). Her book is Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011). She was senior co-editor of Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity (2011-2016), President of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (2015-2019), and is currently Vice President of the International Society for the Critical Study of Divination (2023-present). As part of the “Knowing Hands” project, her current book manuscript Grasping Heaven and Earth: The Mind in Hand in Chinese Medicine examines how Chinese healers used their hands to think with, prognosticate, and heal.