Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Medicine
Episode: Hilary A. Smith, “Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine” (Stanford UP, 2017)
Description: Hilary A. Smith’s new book examines the evolution of a Chinese disease concept, foot qi (jiao qi) from its documented origins in the fourth century to the present day. However, at its heart Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine (Stanford University Press, 2017) isn’t so much about the history of foot qi and its associated constellation of disease concepts, as it is about the larger questions of how we approach the pre-modern history of disease and understand historical disease concepts more generally. As a result, while readers looking for accounts that form part of a global history of b...