Sethina Watson, On Hospitals: Welfare, Law and Christianity in Western Europe, 400–1320 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020). 376 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-884753-3.

Abstract

struggling to assess historical materials from the PRC. In the conclusion, Fang clarifies the core concept of the ‘emergency disciplinary state’ and discusses similarities to how the PRC has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Fang’s core argument is that the PRC’s emergency disciplinary state was established in reaction to the El Tor cholera pandemic. However, the book can also be read as an account of the resistance, confrontations, and negotiations that occurred between various strands of power in moving towards that style of governance, whichwas not without its blind spots: public health staff encountered difficulties and even violence when attempting to check inoculation certificates of officers in the People’s Liberation Army (Chapter 4); overseas Chinese were exempted from vaccination certificate checks because the PRC needed their remittances and skills (Chapter 4); and the Zhejiang government adapted its 1963 vaccination campaign to avoid peak farming season due to the passive participation of local cadres and farmworkers the previous year (Chapter 6). There was therefore some flexibility in the PRC’s seemingly strict approach to epidemic control. It is unfortunate that Fang does not analyse the sources cited in the text more often, as the rare occasions where he weighs in on conflicting information encountered in the archives (pp. 41–3) are enlightening. Chapter 2 also includes some passages in which the causal relationship between environmental and social factors and the public health situation are not clearly established by historical sources or by the author himself (pp. 74–5, 100). Fang’s account of this much-overlooked public health crisis draws on abundant historical materials. The book is a must-read for historians and students interested in the PRC’s health policies, as well as for those curious about crisis governance in the PRC at the national, provincial, and county levels during transitional years between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.