Dissertation Information for Yuki Terazawa NAME: - Yuki Terazawa
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2001)
ADVISORS: - Fred G. Notehelfer - Herman Ooms
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Sharon Jean Traweek - Mariko Tamanoi
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Gender, knowledge, and power: Reproductive medicine in Japan, 1790--1930
Abstract: This dissertation examines how the female reproductive body was defined and treated by various medical systems in Japan between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. One of my aims is to clarify the process through which the medical body as circumscribed by Chinese medical discourse lost its preeminence as it was replaced by an anatomical body constructed within modern European medicine. I argue that such shifts in delineating the female reproductive body occurred through the active involvement of medical professionals and the state in pursuit of their own interests.
The expanding market for medical professionals in the increasingly commercialized Tokugawa society (1603-1868) from the late seventeenth century onward prompted physicians to actively seek out more sophisticated and effective methods. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Japanese physicians appropriated a medical body constructed by the refined and systematized Chinese medical theories originating in Jin, Yuan and Ming China. This was followed by the introduction of an anatomical body similar to the one found in European medicine in the mid-eighteenth century. However, this epistemic shift in the eighteenth century initially derived from methodological shifts within the Chinese medical tradition that paralleled a similar development in Confucian scholarship. This far-reaching re-orientation, in part, resulted in the rise of the Kagawa School of Obstetrics that devised new surgical methods for various types of childbirth.
In the Meiji period (1868-1912), the state played an important role in supporting medical research and forming health policy based on full-fledged appropriation of European medicine. In this context, knowledge produced through the new practice of consigning each individual to a sex and race by scientifically legitimate methods was accumulated and used in conjunction with state objectives. This entailed a process where the female reproductive body came to be subject to a new type of surveillance by the state and organized medicine. At the same time, women were transformed into modern subjects who adhered to new ideas and practices concerning their body, health, and well being.
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MPACT Scores for Yuki Terazawa A = 0
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calculated 2008-09-03 22:12:33
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