Abstract:

Andrew Cunningham observes that medicine is easily left out of the history of medicine. Medical history offers opportunities to explore biography, institutions, power and gender relations, while the work of understanding and treating illness may recede from view. What historians recognize as ‘medical’ is shaped by our training, epistemology, and life commitments. Drawing on encounters between Chinese and Western scholars and doctors, I examine how individual life trajectories, language, and classification shape what becomes visible and what is erased in the cross-cultural history of medicine.

Bee Bridie Andrews is a recently retired historian of medicine and East Asian culture at Bentley University whose research explores the exchanges between Chinese and Western medical knowledge and practice. Her work examines how translation, scientific ideas, and international encounters shaped medicine in modern China and the West. Since her return to the UK in 2025 she has been working as a medical herbalist, gaining new insights into the cross-fertilisation of medical ideas in practice.

She is the author of The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine (2014), a finalist for the International Congress of Asian Scholars Book Prize, and co-editor of Medical Transitions in Twentieth-Century China (2014), Medicine and Identity in the Colonies (2003), and Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (1997). She also translated Paul U. Unschuld’s Traditional Chinese Medicine: Heritage and Adaptation from German (2018).

Andrews earned her PhD in the history of medicine at the University of Cambridge, following studies in Chinese language, medicine, and pharmacy in China. She previously taught history of science at Harvard University and held fellowships at Fudan University in Shanghai, the University of Pennsylvania, and SOAS, London.