Midwifery in China

Midwifery in China PDF Author: Ngai Fen Cheung
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351124501
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
The first book to present the history, ideas, life and works of Chinese midwives and birth attendants, this volume seeks to encapsulate and explain the changing ideas about the practice of midwifery in China. Using participant observations and interviews, it examines each phase of the development of midwifery in depth. Providing a systematic study of the existing literature and contemporary national health policies, it analyses the factors contributing to the current demise of midwifery in China, such as the absence of national regulation, high standards of education and national midwives’ associations. Furthermore, it argues that China’s national statistics in the past six decades demonstrate clear evidence that minimising maternal mortality rates will only happen through wider availability of services, rather than through obstetric technology or facility based care. Ultimately, therefore this book supports the view that humanity and midwifery will survive to overcome domination by both technology and market forces and that economic growth and medical technology alone will not be sufficient in providing effective healthcare. This book is an indispensable resource for the study of Chinese midwifery, both in theory and in practice. As such it will be useful to students and scholars of Midwifery, Women’s Health, Sociology and culture and society in China.

Midwifery in China

Midwifery in China PDF Author: Ngai Fen Cheung
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351124501
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first book to present the history, ideas, life and works of Chinese midwives and birth attendants, this volume seeks to encapsulate and explain the changing ideas about the practice of midwifery in China. Using participant observations and interviews, it examines each phase of the development of midwifery in depth. Providing a systematic study of the existing literature and contemporary national health policies, it analyses the factors contributing to the current demise of midwifery in China, such as the absence of national regulation, high standards of education and national midwives’ associations. Furthermore, it argues that China’s national statistics in the past six decades demonstrate clear evidence that minimising maternal mortality rates will only happen through wider availability of services, rather than through obstetric technology or facility based care. Ultimately, therefore this book supports the view that humanity and midwifery will survive to overcome domination by both technology and market forces and that economic growth and medical technology alone will not be sufficient in providing effective healthcare. This book is an indispensable resource for the study of Chinese midwifery, both in theory and in practice. As such it will be useful to students and scholars of Midwifery, Women’s Health, Sociology and culture and society in China.

Intimate Communities

Intimate Communities PDF Author: Nicole Elizabeth Barnes
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520300467
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population. Intimate Communities argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate, agricultural population that could not relate to urban elites’ conceptualization of nationalism, these women used their work of healing to create emotional bonds with soldiers and civilians from across the country. These bonds transcended the divides of social class, region, gender, and language.

Childbirth in Republican China

Childbirth in Republican China PDF Author: Tina Johnson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739164422
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Delivering Modernity: Childbirth in Republican China (1911-1949) is the study of a pivotal period in which traditional midwifery, marked by private, unregulated old-style midwives, was transformed into modern midwifery through the adoption of a highly medicalized and state-sponsored birth model that is standard in urban China today. In the twentieth century, biomedical technologies altered the process of childbirth on virtually every level. What had been a matter of private interest, focusing on the family and lineage, became a national priority, a symbol of the new citizen who would participate in the creation of a revitalized nation. This transformation of reproduction coalesces with the broader story of China's twentieth-century revolutions, marked by an emphasis on science and modernity. The roles of the state and of western medical personnel were paramount in affecting these changes, but equally important are the intense social and cultural shifts that occurred simultaneously. The dominant themes of reproduction in twentieth-century China are characterized by expanding state involvement, shifting gender roles, escalating consumption patterns accompanying the commercialization of private lives, and the increasing medicalization of the birth process.

Reproducing Women

Reproducing Women PDF Author: Yi-Li Wu
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520947614
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
This innovative book uses the lens of cultural history to examine the development of medicine in Qing dynasty China. Focusing on the specialty of "medicine for women"(fuke), Yi-Li Wu explores the material and ideological issues associated with childbearing in the late imperial period. She draws on a rich array of medical writings that circulated in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century China to analyze the points of convergence and contention that shaped people's views of women's reproductive diseases. These points of contention touched on fundamental issues: How different were women's bodies from men's? What drugs were best for promoting conception and preventing miscarriage? Was childbirth inherently dangerous? And who was best qualified to judge? Wu shows that late imperial medicine approached these questions with a new, positive perspective.

Between Birth and Death

Between Birth and Death PDF Author: Michelle King
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804785983
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Female infanticide is a social practice often closely associated with Chinese culture. Journalists, social scientists, and historians alike emphasize that it is a result of the persistence of son preference, from China's ancient past to its modern present. Yet how is it that the killing of newborn daughters has come to be so intimately associated with Chinese culture? Between Birth and Death locates a significant historical shift in the representation of female infanticide during the nineteenth century. It was during these years that the practice transformed from a moral and deeply local issue affecting communities into an emblematic cultural marker of a backwards Chinese civilization, requiring the scientific, religious, and political attention of the West. Using a wide array of Chinese, French and English primary sources, the book takes readers on an unusual historical journey, presenting the varied perspectives of those concerned with the fate of an unwanted Chinese daughter: a late imperial Chinese mother in the immediate moments following birth, a male Chinese philanthropist dedicated to rectifying moral behavior in his community, Western Sinological experts preoccupied with determining the comparative prevalence of the practice, Catholic missionaries and schoolchildren intent on saving the souls of heathen Chinese children, and turn-of-the-century reformers grappling with the problem as a challenge for an emerging nation.

Childbirth, Midwifery and Concepts of Time

Childbirth, Midwifery and Concepts of Time PDF Author: Christine McCourt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845455866
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
All cultures are concerned with the business of childbirth, so much so that it can never be described as a purely physiological or even psychological event. This volume draws together work from a range of anthropologists and midwives who have found anthropological approaches useful in their work. Using case studies from a variety of cultural settings, the writers explore the centrality of the way time is conceptualized, marked and measured to the ways of perceiving and managing childbirth: how women, midwives and other birth attendants are affected by issues of power and control, but also actively attempt to change established forms of thinking and practice. The stories are engaging as well as critical and invite the reader to think afresh about time, and about reproduction.

The Gender of Memory

The Gender of Memory PDF Author: Gail Hershatter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520950348
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865-2015

Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865-2015 PDF Author: Liping Bu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317541359
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book, based on extensive original research, traces the development of China’s public health system, showing how advances in public health have been an integral part of China’s rise. It outlines the phenomenal improvements in public health, for example the increase in life expectancy from 38 in 1949 to 73 in 2010; relates developments in public health to prevailing political ideologies; and discusses how the drivers of health improvements were, unlike in the West, modern medical professionals and intellectuals who understood that, whatever the prevailing ideology, China needs to be a strong country. The book explores how public health concepts, policies, programmes, institutions and practices changed and developed through social and political upheavals, war, and famine, and argues that this perspective of China’s development is refreshingly different from China’s development viewed purely in political terms.

Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier

Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier PDF Author: Betty-Anne Daviss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000335534
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
This book addresses the politics of global health and social justice issues around birth, focusing on dynamic communities that have chosen to speak truth to power by reforming dysfunctional health care systems or creating new ones outside the box. The chapters present models of childbirth at extreme ends of a spectrum—from the conflict zones and disaster areas of Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, and Indonesia, to high-risk tertiary care settings in China, Canada, Australia, and Turkey. Debunking notions about best care, the volume illustrates how human rights in health care are on a collision course with global capitalism and offers a number of specific solutions to this ever-increasing problem. This volume will be a valuable resource for scholars and students in anthropology, sociology, health, and midwifery, as well as for practitioners, policy makers, and organizations focused on birth or on social activism in any arena.

Maternal Healthcare and Doulas in China

Maternal Healthcare and Doulas in China PDF Author: Zoe Z. Dai
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030469638
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
This brief explores the resurgence of the role of doulas in the child birthing process in Chinese clinical settings, as a lens to understand comparative pre- and post-natal care worldwide. The demand for doulas in China is increasing, and the rise in the use of doulas is thought to be due to increasing dissatisfaction with current institutional maternity health care. Attention is focused on Chinese women’s relationships with their bodies and on women’s experiences of choice, agency, and access to health and reproductive services as well as maternal health care information and support. Chapters present an overview of the current experience of pre- and post- natal care in China. In addition, chapters explore interview data on how Chinese doulas construct multiple identities, in terms of serving as lactation consultants, child care providers, and child care educators for women during pregnancy and childbirth. Maternal Healthcare and Doulas in China will be of interest to researchers in public health and health policy, particularly with an interest in maternal health or Asian studies, as well as, health practitioners, and clinicians who are interested in issues related to women, maternity, health care, childbirth, and feminist research in China.