Vernacular Medicine and Modes of Knowing in China

Collaborator

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Working group: Modes of Knowing

Yi-Li Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned a Ph.D. in history and an M.A. in international relations from Yale University, and a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Her research on the history of Chinese medicine focuses on the multiple intersections of society, culture, and the body, with special emphasis on the late imperial period (16^th to 19^th centuries). Her publications include Reproducing Women: Medicine, metaphor, and childbirth in late imperial China (University of California Press, 2010), and articles on breast cancer, medical illustration, forensic medicine, bonesetting, the circulation of Chinese medicine in Korea, and Chinese views of European anatomical science. She also commissioned and co-edited a special issue of Asian Medicine (2021) highlighting African American contributions to American Acupuncture. Currently, she is co-editing (with Suman Seth) the eighteenth-century volume of a new six-volume Cambridge History of Medicine, under contract with Cambridge University Press. She is also completing a manuscript on the history of Chinese medicine for wounds and injuries.