Diabetes: A Transcultural History of a Disease Concept in the Late Qing and Republican China

Abstract

In the past few years, the medical knowledge transfer in a West-East direction has attracted increased scholarly attention from European and American historians, whereas studies on such “knowledge travels” conducted in the East Asian context focus mainly on political and socio-cultural concepts. To provide an alternative perspective on the travel of Western medicine to Chinese soil, a case study on “diabetes” is conducted, under the theoretical framework of “transcultural conceptual history”. This paper systematically analyses the standardization, popularization, politicization, and derivatizationof “diabetes”, calling for further attention to transcultural histories of medical concepts in modern China.