A Wilderness of Marshes: The Origins of Public Health in Shanghai, 1843-1893

Front Cover
Lexington Books, 2002 - History - 346 pages
The successful emergence of Shanghai as a world city by the close of the nineteenth century was built upon the establishment of a modern urban base. No aspect of Shanghai's infrastructural developments was more critically important than the creation of a public health system. A Wilderness of Marshes traces Shanghai's medical infrastructure from its conception to the implementation of a Western-style public health system and a municipal government to manage it. Kerrie MacPherson details the pioneering actions of Shanghai's capitalist, professional, and religious communities who skillfully adapted the ideas and practices gaining currency in Western science, medicine, public morality, and urban circumstances to the Asian metropolis.
 

Contents

Introduction A Most Unlikely Place
1
The Climatological Reconnaissance
15
The Elaboration of a Medical Topography
49
Sanitary Reform Prelude to Pure Water
68
The Best of its Kind The Shanghai Waterworks
83
Salus Populi Suprema Lex The Evolution of Public Medicine
123
A Charitable Enterprise The Chinese Hospital
143
From the Eleemosynary to the Quasipublic The Transformation of the Shanghai General Hospital
172
State Medicine and the Experiment of the Lock Hospital
213
Conclusion The Foundation of a Community
259
Notes
276
Selected Bibliography
306
Glossary
337
Index
340
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Page 324 - CE Waterworks Distribution. A practical guide to the laying out of systems of distributing mains for the supply of water to cities and towns. With tables, folding plates and numerous full.page diagrams. 8vo, cloth, illustrated $2.50 MERRITT, WM.

About the author (2002)

Kerrie L. MacPherson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong.