Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963: A Medicine of Revolution

Kim Taylor is a historian of Chinese medicine, and this academic book, published by RoutledgeCurzon, is a history specifically of how traditional Chinese medicine was reshaped into its modern standardized form under the early Communist government between 1945 and 1963. Its strength is documentary, drawing on archival and policy sources to show that what is commonly called Traditional Chinese Medicine today is in significant part a twentieth century political and institutional construction, not an unbroken ancient practice handed down unchanged. That is a genuinely important corrective for the atlas to carry accurately. Its limit is chronological and geographic focus, it covers a specific period and mainland Chinese policy context, not the full history of Chinese medical thought before or its practice in other Chinese speaking regions.