AHA Session 24
Thursday, January 8, 2026: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Wilson Room (Palmer House Hilton, Third Floor)
Chair:
Lan Li, Johns Hopkins University
Papers:
Comment:
Lan Li, Johns Hopkins University
Session Abstract
This proposed panel aims to engage with the recent trend of materiality in medical history, examining how material substances and practices shape medical knowledge and practices. The concept of “hybridity,” originally proposed by environmental historian Paul S. Sutter, emphasizes the interconnectedness and interdependence of human and non-human entities within shared environments. This session, titled “Towards the Hybrid Materiality: Environment, Body, and Animals in the Medical History of 20th Century China”, extends discussions on the materiality of medical history through the lens of hybridity, focusing on the dynamic and non-dichotomy interactions between environment and humans, between body and mind, and between animals and human society. The papers in this session shed light on different aspects of medical materiality in 20th-century China: Yating Li’s paper, “Gendered Pathology: Hysteria, Body, and Forensic Medicine in 1930s China,” investigates the forensic examinations of Hysteria and how they reflect the gendered narratives of mental illness that pathologize the physiological body. By analyzing the translation and interpretation of hysteria within a global and gendered context, Li’s work reveals the gendered and national discourses embedded in the formation of scientific knowledge around mental health in China. Yinghua Luo’s paper, “Burning Money: Materiality and Modernity in the Construction of Peking Union Medical College (1916-1942),” deciphers how Rockefeller-funded medical modernity was materially negotiated through coal-fed power plants and artesian wells, exposing a paradoxical “infrastructural alchemy” that hybridized global biomedical ideals with Beijing’s pre-modern urban ecology, ultimately forcing transnational actors to confront the unsustainable costs of maintaining civilizational boundaries. Xianglong Zhu’s paper, “Animal for Survival: Veterinary Medicine and Logistic Capacity in Wartime China, 1937–1949,” examines how, in wartime China, systematic practices in maintaining, healing, and vaccinating animals were crucial for powering the logistical infrastructures of both the Nationalist and Communist forces, as revealed through veterinary journals, military archives, and other sources. Foregrounding nonhuman agency and employing a One Health lens reshapes our understanding of wartime mobilization. Together, this panel offers a nuanced understanding of how the historicity and materiality of medical knowledge in 20th-century China were shaped by hybrid interactions between environment, human (body/mind), and animals.
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