DATE: April 12, 2021 (Monday)
TIME: 9:30am-11:00am (HKT)

Abstract:

Drawing on his new book, Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History, Wayne Soon (PhD Princeton) makes the case for a new concept of “global medicine" to highlight the multivalent and multidirectional flows of medical practices and ideas circulating around the world in the 20th century. Soon will examine two case studies on how the Chinese diaspora came to shape biomedicine in China and Taiwan from 1911 to 1970. First, the presentation examines how Penang-born and Cambridge-trained Dr. Wu Lien-teh made visible globally antipandemic measures in Manchuria in 1911. Second, this talk shows how Singapore-born and Edinburgh-educated Dr. Robert Lim successfully relocated the National Defense Medical Center from China to Taiwan in 1948 despite the longstanding challenges posed by the Chinese Civil War. This presentation highlights the essential intersections of expertise, freedoms, and diasporic power in shaping global medicine in China and Taiwan through a critical examination of these two medical encounters between the diaspora and the local Chinese and Taiwanese.

Speaker: Dr. Wayne Soon (Vassar College)

Dan Liu is a first-year PhD student from the Department of Sociology, the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include the social aspects of biomedicine and health, sociology of the body and the knowledge production of medicine. Focusing on people with cleft lip and/or palate, she is conducting an ethnography on a stomatological hospital in southwestern China as an assistant social worker. She intends to explore the lived experience of people with cleft lip and the various medical practices embedded in their daily lives. She obtained her MA in Sociology from Renmin University of China and BA in Social Work from Sichuan University.

Discussant: Professor Vivian Lin (University of Hong Kong)

Dr. Xiaoli Tian is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. from Department of Sociology, The University of Chicago. Her research interests include how preexisting knowledge paradigms and cultural norms influence the way people respond to unexpected transformations of their everyday routines. Her writings have been published in American Journal of Sociology; Sociological Forum, Qualitative Sociology; Modern China; Journal of Contemporary China; Information, Communication and Society; Journal of Contemporary Ethnography; Media, Culture and Society; Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, among others. received the Association for Death Education and Counseling 2020 Research Recognition Award.

Moderator: Dr. Harry Wu (University of Hong Kong)

Registration:

All are welcome, please register at https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?UEID=74388. This event will be conducted via zoom. The link shall be given the day before the event. Should you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact Mr. Adrian Kam by email at chm1@hku.hk or by phone at 39172867.