ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Miraculous Hands: Female Practitioners of Western Medicine in Chinese Pictorials, 1884-1913

• In Event: Women Healers: Nursing in the Early 20th Century

English Abstract

This paper examines representations of female medical practitioners in late Qing lithographic pictorials, situating them within broader transformations in Chinese medical culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Edited largely by traditional literati, these pictorials circulated as regular mass media combining text and image, yet their portrayals of medicine, disease, and healing remain understudied. The study focuses on female practitioners, both Western missionary physicians and Chinese women trained in Western medicine, frequently depicted as showing miraculous skill. Interventions such as tumor excisions, gynecological operations, and caesarean sections are dramatized through grotesque pathology, tense surgical postures, and heightened operative moments. These depictions reshaped contemporary perceptions of bodily intervention and therapeutic authority, presenting surgery as a technologically advanced and socially legitimate practice in a context where operative medicine remained ambivalent. The prominence of female practitioners is particularly striking given late Qing gender segregation and the scarcity of women physicians. The pictorials both documented and amplified instances of gender inversion, portraying women as authoritative actors in traditionally male domains. They also highlight the first generation of Chinese women trained in Western medicine, whose public representation as clinicians, educators, and charitable workers signaled an emergent, though contested, reconfiguration of gendered professional authority. Collectively, these pictorials trace the trajectory of medical modernization in China, revealing how Western medicine intersected with local practices, gender reform, and shifting cultural norms. They demonstrate the complex ways in which mass media mediated new understandings of the body, medical authority, and the expanding roles women could occupy within an evolving medical landscape.

Author

• Dizhen Wu