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Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.
For almost two centuries, the category of 'applied science' was widely taken to be both real and important. Then, its use faded. How could an entire category of science appear and disappear? By taking a longue durée approach to British attitudes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Robert Bud explores the scientific and cultural trends that led to such a dramatic rise and fall. He traces the prospects and consequences that gave the term meaning, from its origins to its heyday as an elixir to cure many of the economic, cultural, and political ills of the UK, eventually overtaken by its competitor, 'technology'. Bud examines how 'applied science' was shaped by educational and research institutions, sociotechnical imaginaries, and political ideologies and explores the extent to which non-scientific lay opinion, mediated by politicians and newspapers, could become a driver in the classification of science.
The unifying theme of this volume is the changing role of the countryside in national life, and the impact upon it of the social and economic forces unleashed by industrialisation and the growth of towns.