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The 106th Peking University Medical Humanities Forum: The stigma of leprosy in China in the late Qing Dynasty from the perspective of transnational history

Lecture Information:

Time:  November 28, 2022 (Monday) 9:00-11:00

VenueRoom 620, Yifu Teaching Building, Peking University Health Science Center (offline)

Tencent Meeting: 551-7644-2872, Password: 2022 (online)

Speaker: Zhou Donghua, Professor (Hangzhou Normal University)

Moderator: Chen Qi, Associate Professor (School of Health Humanities, Peking University)

Commentator: Zhang Daqing, Distinguished Professor of Boya (School of Health Humanities, Peking University)

    

Lecture Title: The stigma of leprosy in China in the late Qing Dynasty from the perspective of transnational history

     

Abstract: 

  Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease which mainly affects the skin, mucous membrane and peripheral nerves. For a long time, the strong public fear, discrimination and stigma associated with leprosy, as well as the exclusion, isolation and persecution of sufferers, have made this disease, which is rarely a direct threat to people's physical and mental health, a public health and social issue of global concern. In the late Qing Dynasty, the history of tropical medicine was developed along with the change of Britain and America from colonialism to imperialism. With the concept of leper country constructed by medical missionaries and customs doctors of Western powers in China, the concept of "Chinese coolie = leprosy" constructed by Conde Li after investigating leprosy in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and the stigmatized Chinese immigrants to Australia and the United States as patients of "Chinese disease", The stigmatized concept of "leper Chinaman" was manufactured and continuously solidified in the Western discourse hegemony in the era of imperialism, which became the epitome of the construction of "China" in tropical medicine. 

       

Speaker:

  Zhou Donghua, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Department of History of Hangzhou Normal University, is engaged in the research of modern China's medical and social history, history of education, history of social welfare, history of Anti-Japanese War, history of Zhejiang in the Republic of China, public history and contemporary society, modernization theory and the modernization process of East Asia. He has published more than 10 academic works, such as A Study on the Origin of Authoritarianism in the Process of Postwar Philippine Modernization, A Study on Christian Education in Zhejiang during the Republic of China, and Examples of Zhejiang Red History and Culture. He has also published dozens of academic papers in journals such as Modern History Studies, Academic Monthly, Sociological Studies, and World Religion Studies, and has won many provincial and municipal awards. He has presided over and completed two projects of the National Social Science Fund, and is now in charge of the major project of the National Social Science Fund, "Collation and Research of Historical Materials of Leprosy Isolation and Epidemic Prevention in China (1368-1978)" (20&ZD223).