Health, medicine and disease : among the barefoot doctors of Hangzhou

• Main Author: Fang, Xiaoping
• Other Authors: T. D. DuBois
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::History; China; Medicines
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/153520
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

My research focuses on the histories of medicine, health, and disease in rural China after 1949. From 2002 to 2012, I researched the lives and activities of the so-called “barefoot doctors” (chijiao yisheng 赤脚医生) in Chinese villages during the Cultural Revolution. In contrast to much of the existing scholarship in the field, which was based largely on written texts and archival documents, the fields of medical anthropology and sociology inspired me to develop a research methodology and theoretical framework from the perspective of historical anthropology. Alongside traditional sources such as archival documents, I came to rely on oral interviews and local documents obtained from fieldwork. In this chapter, I share my fieldwork experience researching the history of medicine in Zhejiang Province by addressing the following key questions: why was fieldwork indispensable? How did I choose my fieldwork site? How did I conduct the fieldwork and overcome difficulties that arose during this process? How did my fieldwork findings contribute to current scholarship in the history of medicine, health, and disease?