Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China 1945-1963

Kim Taylor's study of the origins of the formative period of TCM in its early decades is mandatory reading for everybody in the field. Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China describes the transformation of Chinese medicine from the marginal, sidelined medical practice of the mid-twentieth century, to an essential and high-profile part of the national health care system under the Chinese Communist Party.

The analysis begins with the start of the Civil war 1945-49, when the CCP was entrenched in rural Yan'an and began to enlist practitioners of Chinese medicine into the communist revolution. Taylor explains that Chinese medicine achieved the scale of promotion it did precisely because it fitted in sometimes in an almost accidental fashion, with the ideals of the Communist Revolution.

Kim Taylor is an affiliated scholar of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the history of disease, medicine and the imperial world and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Chinese medicine.