Description

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Applying critical research on healing and the body to Asian studies, the articles in Empires of Hygiene challenge the assumptions about the universality of medical truth. This collection investigates how medicine, the craft of healing, also acts as a sort of hygiene - a disciplinary agent against the unruly forces of nature and culture. Assuming the complicity of scientific medical practice with forms of dominaton and exclusion, the contributors not only demonstrate how medicine has been used as a tool of empire but also ways in which events and institutions have literally transformed bodily life in Asia.