A flourishing yin: gender in China's medical history, 960–1665

Fraser's early chapters tell the familiar story of the "midwife problem" as conceived among southern public health officials in the 1920s and 1930s, drawing heavily and appropriately on the existent historiography. The later chapters turn to her interviews, the most original and interesting part of the book. What do living African Americans remember about the transition from the midwife-assisted home birth to the doctor and the hospital? Apparently, Fraser found far less information in her interviews than expected. She points out her own surprise that her interview subjects appeared embarrassed by the topic itself, and even more so by the idea of discussing it with herself, a young, unmarried woman. Further, far from accepting the author's valuation of black midwives, many of her subjects were reluctant to admit they had been attended by these women. It was a mark of shame, of poverty, of backwardness, of ignorance. Throughout Fraser laces her tale with sophisticated and fascinating analysis of the body and its meaning, of concepts of impurity and racism, of the balance of power and knowledge. Her account is rich in its nuanced description of all of childbirth's stages, from the prenatal period to the time of "reentry' into ordinary life. Overall it is clear that Fraser wants to find that her midwives had a strong, traditional, and efficacious knowledge of healing and childbirth, a motherwit that was every bit as valuable as the "scientific medicine" that triumphed over it, but she ultimately lacks the data to make this argument. Much of Fraser's account echoes older historiography by emphasizing the aspects of oppression and, in this case, racism, that were involved in the twentieth-century transition in the midwives' role. Although admitting that African American women welcomed the opportunities offered by a hospital birth, including anaesthesia, Fraser ultimately sees these women not as making informed choices, but as dupes of the medical establishment that has robbed them of their heritage. One suspects that romantic sentimentality for the midwife and her culture has blinded Fraser to the hard realities of the "old times" and to the improvements that modernity has brought to southern African American women. Charlotte Furth's work consists of two major sections. Chapters 1 to 6 set out the textual history of Chinese medicine from the tenth to the seventeenth century, with emphasis laid on the way women and their bodies were viewed, described and prescribed for in the fuke …