This article argues that the establishment of anatomo-power in China preceded and set the foundation for biopower. Anatomo-power is disciplinary power over live bodies in the military, schools, and hospitals, but also the power of the medical profession over dead bodies to investigate pathology through dissection. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese conceptions of political anatomy were used to advocate anatomical knowledge, and an anatomy law in 1913 made routinized dissection possible. Chinese society began to be transformed as old taboos were broken, and thousands of new terms allowed the scientific worldview to take root among professionals and the public. Anatomical researchers addressed both microscopic pathology to cure individuals and macroscopic questions that grouped individuals into a population to be managed, or that sought data to tell new narratives about the origins and future of humanity—a new political anatomy based on the practice of human dissection.
When many historians of medicine think of China, the first thing that comes to mind is traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Yet the dominant form of medicine in China today is Western medicine (xiyi), and TCM as practiced in China has adopted many concepts and therapies from biomedicine. In other words, biomedicine is by far the most important form of medicine in China, as can be seen in the decline of interest in TCM medical schools, or in the biomedical analysis of an ancient Chinese drug that resulted recently in a Nobel Prize for Tu Youyou. Yet although digital sources for scholars and students of the history of medicine in the US and Western Europe are widely available in most research libraries, sources for the history of medicine in China have lagged behind. In 2009,
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