ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disciplining Bodies through Disciplining Medicine: Plastic Surgery and Statecraft in 20th-Century US-Taiwan Relations

• In Event: Contested Bodies: Science and Statecraft in 20th-Century China and Taiwan

English Abstract

Plastic surgery is typically considered peripheral to biomedicine, much less statecraft. Yet its evolution in the 20th century served as a crucial site of meaning-making around the ideal human body. A wartime technology, plastic surgery’s goal was to reconstruct disfigured bodies into productive citizens. Concurrently, the mid-20th century saw the rise of nation-states as the modern unit of Cold War politics. In this political environment, plastic surgery became a tool for shaping the futures of new states and their recovering populations.

This paper takes as its case study the American Bureau of Medical Aid to China (ABMAC), a US-based nonprofit which contributed significantly to establishing western biomedicine in Taiwan, alongside the plastic surgeon Dr. Jerome P. Webster (1888-1974). In the 1920s, Webster served as the Peking Union Medical College’s first surgical resident; it was here that he committed to plastic surgery. In 1937, he helped found ABMAC, serving the Nationalist government in China during the Second Sino-Japanese war. And throughout the 1940s-70s, as the Nationalists relocated to Taiwan and struggled for global recognition over Communist China, ABMAC helped promote a particularly American, not simply western, form of scientific modernity in Taiwan.

In this way, Taiwan’s medical education system represents a co-constructed project between Nationalist statecraft and American biomedicine. What role did Webster and ABMAC play in the circulation of plastic surgery knowledge production between East and West? And how did the professionalization of plastic surgery intertwine with the formation of the modern Taiwanese state and the disciplining of Taiwanese citizens?

Author

• Adrien Gau, University of Pennsylvania