Leading scholars from around the world will gather at Bentley to discuss key texts in the history of Chinese medicine as a preparatory step in the editing of the Handbook of Chinese Medical Literature. Bridie Andrews, associate professor of history, will use a $24,820 conference grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange to organize the conference “Understanding Chinese Medical Literature” for August, 2012.

“The goal of this conference is to assemble colleagues who will help me write and edit a first-to-market reference work in English about the classical medical literature of China, and for each attendee to present a first draft of a chapter of that work,” Andrews notes. “We will discuss individual works (such as the Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine or the Treatise on Cold Damage) in the context of the literary heritage of Chinese medicine, with an eye to identifying different medical approaches and lineages and understanding their historical and clinical relevance.”

For both the conference and the book, Andrews is collaborating with leading medical historians Dr. Shih-Ch’i Chin in Taiwan, and Dr. Ka-wai Fan in Hong Kong.

Andrews studied in China for two years at Xiamen University and the Nanjing College of Pharmacy, where she explored the evolution of Chinese medicine in relation to politics, public perceptions, and Western influences. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University in England and is co-editor of Medicine and Colonial Identity (Routledge, 2003), and Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1997).