Sacred Medicine: Healing the Chinese Nation during the War with Japan

Sacred Medicine: Healing the Chinese Nation during the War with Japan Nicole Elizabeth Barnes PhD Candidate Chinese History University of California, Irvine nbarnes@uci.edu China's eight-year-long war with Japan (1937-45) produced millions of refugees who fled to Free China in the interior. This flood of refugees more than doubled the population of Chongqing, the wartime capital in the southwestern province of Sichuan. This population increase, coupled with the city's poor public health infrastructure, frequent bombings by the Japanese military, and seasonal epidemics, created a severe public health crisis to which many parties responded, each in a different manner according to that which it believed most sacred. Most Chinese doctors remained loyal to their knowledge about healing and naturally occurring medicines that had been accumulated over centuries. Foreign missionaries, believing in the Christian life of service and the sanctity of Jesus as Christ, provided medical service as a means of propagating their faith. American philanthropic organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation's China Medical Board and the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China (ABMAC), believed in the scientific laboratory as a space where the “truth” is discovered and manipulated. Accordingly, they supported projects that followed biomedical procedures and prescriptions. These included the public health organs of the Guomindang state built just outside the city proper by a government that believed in institutionalized administration as the best means of addressing social problems. Meanwhile, Chinese citizens saw the body as sacred and often resisted biomedical procedures such as surgery, which violated the belief that the body must be kept fully intact for the afterlife. This paper explores cultural conflicts that resulted from multiple methods of administering healthcare in wartime China and illustrates how beliefs about the sacred shape our desires, goals, and interpersonal relations.