Medicine, health, and disease: among the barefoot doctors of Hangzhou

The history of medicine, health, and disease in the twentieth century is
closely entwined with the advent of modern medicine and state-building in
changing political-social contexts. During this time, the scientization, institutionalization, and professionalization of medicine and global health
governance have become major issues throughout the world, including
China, where they have been gradually implanted, resisted, assimilated,
and accepted.
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?