Syringe Assemblage: A Biography of Injection in Modern China, 1920s-1970s

Abstract

My dissertation traces the story of how injection was transformed over the course of China’s twentieth century. While injection began as an efficacious drug delivery method that symbolized biomedical modernity, the syringe was eventually repurposed as a technology used in traditional Chinese medicine. Central to this story was the 1940s development of traditional Chinese medicine injection in a Communist base, a revolutionary technological development steeped in revolutionary politics. Through a biography of injection therapy, I argue that modern China’s continuing search for alternatives to Western medical practices, though predominantly framed in recent years as contention between science and pseudoscience, is better understood as a blending of tradition and modernity by giving new life to old materials through modern technologies amidst a nexus of modern science, capitalism, nationalism, and the Communist Revolution. I utilize a variety of primary sources in the dissertation: published injection therapy manuals, newspapers (both commercial and party-owned), popular science journals, specialized scientific journals, company-supported publications and journals that served both purposes of mass advertisement and pharmaceutical science dissemination, government archives of both Republican China (1911-1949) and the People’s Republic of China (1949-present), party leaders’ memoirs and recollections, and compilation of company histories published in the 1980s and 1990s. Based on extensive archives, I situate the invention of traditional Chinese medicine injection within the historical development of what my historical actors and sources have called “making Chinese drugs through Western pharmaceutics” – a new pharmaceutical practice and drug making process that in praxis foregrounded scientizing traditional drugs between 1920s and 1970s. It is the historical formation of this practice that brought about what I describe as an ontological transformation of traditional drugs, resulting in pharmaceutical products marketed as “traditional Chinese medicinal drugs in Western drug dosage forms” starting in the 1930s. Between the 1940s and 1970s, the continuing development of herbal injection began to symbolize the Communist Party’s relentless search for an integrated medicine that blended both Chineseness and foreignness as an alternative to capitalist science. It was a result of inherent contradictions in China’s Communist revolution: contradictions between the Party’s parochial nationalism for its state-building and the cosmopolitan ideology of Communism, and between its attempt to naturalize revolutionary politics and nationalize (the presumably) universal science. Ultimately, my dissertation shows that the epistemological issue of defining science therefore co-evolved with China’s tumultuous pharmaceutical industrialization and sociopolitical revolutions.