Barefoot doctors and western medicine in China /

A major effort of the Cultural Revolution was to bring better health care to rural China. Local "barefoot doctors" with basic medical training were widely propagandized as having successfully consolidated traditional Chinese medical knowledge to deliver it to the masses. Fang (China Research Centre, Univ. of Technology, Australia) seriously revises this view and shows that the practitioners widely disseminated Western medicine. This is basically an ethnographic study, drawing on local archives in China and hundreds of interviews with villagers and health practitioners, including barefoot doctors and those who became "village doctors" after the Cultural Revolution. The focus on one village in Hangzhou Prefecture gives the book a specificity and immediateness that brings history to life in sometimes dramatic ways. Traditional Chinese medicine required a high degree of literacy, whereas Western medicines were clearly labeled and easy to use. Barely literate rural practitioners could not be expected to master complex ancient practices and opted instead for easily applied Western drugs. This book clearly shows that social, political, and economic factors all played significant roles in transforming health care delivery in rural China because of the barefoot doctors. Summing Up: Recommended. History of medicine/health care collections; upper-division undergraduates and above. J. W. Dauben CUNY Herbert H. Lehman College