Between the Living and the Dead： Trauma Medicine and Forensic Medicine in the Mid-Qing

This paper analyzes the influence of forensic medicine on therapeutic medicine through a case study of Qian Xiuchang and Hu Tingguang, two Chinese doctors who specialized in treating traumatic injuries. During the early nineteenth century, both men compiled medical treatises that sought to improve on a scholarly model of ＂rectifying bones＂ articulated in 1742 by the Imperially-Compiled Golden Mirror of the Medical Lineage. Both texts also incorporated information from forensic medicine, including official inquest diagrams and checklists promulgated by the Qing government. I show that they drew on these forensic materials to help address two interlinked medical issues： understanding the effects of injury on different parts of the body, and clarifying the location and form of the body＇s bones. Overall, I suggest that the exchange of ideas between the realm of therapeutic medicine and forensic medicine was an important epistemological strategy that doctors and officials alike employed to improve their knowledge of the material body.

King, Michelle T. Between Birth and Death： Female Infanticide in Nineteenth- Century China. Stanford, CA： Stanford University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780804785983. xiii＋250pp. $50.00 （cloth）. DOI 10,3868/s020-004-015-0009-9

The great contribution of recent generations of scholarship on women and gender in China has been to dismantle earlier, simplistic narratives of female oppression. They have done this by recovering the complexities of women＇s historical experiences as well as by demonstrating the contested nature of gender and social norms that framed these experiences. Michelle King＇s monograph on the chargedtopic of female infanticide in China is a valuable contribution to this conversation.