Argues that developments in biomedicine in China should be at the center of our understanding of biomedicine, not at the periphery Today China is a major player in advancing the frontiers of biomedicine, yet previous accounts have examined only whether medical ideas and institutions created in the West were successfully transferred to China. This is the firstbook to demonstrate the role China played in creating a globalized biomedicine between 1850 and 1950. This was China's "Century of Humiliation" when imperialist powers dominated China's foreign policy and economy, forcing it to join global trends that included limited public health measures in the nineteenth century and government-sponsored healthcare in the twentieth. These external pressures, combined with a vast population immiserated by imperialism and the decline of the Chinese traditional economy, created extraordinary problems for biomedicine that were both unique to China and potentially applicable to other developing nations. In this book, scholars based in China, the United States, and the United Kingdom make the case that developments in biomedicine in China such as the discovery of new diseases, the opening of the medical profession to women, the mass production of vaccines, and the delivery ofhealthcare to poor rural areas should be at the center of our understanding of biomedicine, not at the periphery. CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Asen, Nicole Barnes, Mary Augusta Brazelton, Gao Xi , He Xiaolian, Li Shenglan, David Luesink, William H. Schneider, Shi Yan, Yu Xinzhong, DAVID LUESINK is Assistant Professor of History at Sacred Heart University. WILLIAM H. SCHNEIDER is Professor Emeritus of History and Medical Humanities at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. ZHANG DAQING is Professor and Director, Institute of Medical Humanities at Peking University in Beijing.

In this innovative and engaging history of homicide investigation in Republican Beijing, Daniel Asen explores the transformation of ideas about death in China in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, those who died violently or under suspicious circumstances constituted a particularly important population of the dead, subject to new claims by police, legal and medical professionals, and a newspaper industry intent on covering urban fatality in sensational detail. Asen examines the process through which imperial China's old tradition of forensic science came to serve the needs of a changing state and society under these dramatically new circumstances. This is a story of the unexpected outcomes and contingencies of modernity, presenting new perspectives on China's transition from empire to modern nation state, competing visions of science and expertise, and the ways in which the meanings of death and dead bodies changed amid China's modern transformation.