An Early Exploration of Female Chinese Medicine Practitioners in the Republican Era (1934-1941)—A Case Study of Zhong Guo Nyu Yi

Abstract: Zhong Guo Nyu Yi (《中国女医》 Chinese Female Physicians ) was the sole professional journal of Chinese medicine led by women in the first half of the 20th century, according to existing journal catalogs. It went through a developmental journey from Nyu Yi Zhuan Hao (《女医专号》 Special Issue for Female Physicians ) attached to Guang Hua Yi Yao Za Zhi (《光华医药杂志》 Guanghua Journal of Medicine ) in 1934, to trial publication relying on Guo Yi Di Zhu (《国医砥柱》 National Medical Pillar Journal ) in 1939, and then to independent publication and cross-regional collaboration attempts in 1941, which is a concrete embodiment of the collective action of female Chinese medicine practitioners in the Republican era. Based on a corpus of 165 articles, 20 advertisements and 9 ancillary texts constructed from authoritative databases such as the National Library of China and the Shanghai Library, this study takes it as a typical case and employs Joan Wallach Scott’s “gender as an analytic category” as the primary framework, supplemented by Tani Barlow’s insights on Republican-era gender constructs and Johanna Drucker’s “graphesis”, to examine the editorial, knowledge production and identity construction practices of Zhong Guo Nyu Yi and related journals from 1934 to 1941. It finds that the journal constructed a discourse system integrating professionalism with feminine traits through dual strategies of “collective consciousness shaping” and “scientific knowledge interpretation”. Based on textual records from the journal itself, female practitioners innovated diagnosis through “embodied experience” in gynecology, expanded their professional scope through cross-disciplinary research in internal medicine, pediatrics and surgery, and reshaped medical ethics via “maternal professionalism”, while also building their professional image through commercial advertisement discourse. These practices contributed gendered practical strength in responding to Western medicine and sustaining Chinese medicine, while enabling female practitioners to negotiate agency between familial duties and medical practice, and they also reveal the complex interaction between knowledge production and gender politics during Chinese medicine’s modernization. Zhong Guo Nyu Yi filled the gap of gender perspective in the historiography of Chinese medicine in the 1930s-1940s, and provides a valuable case for understanding the interaction between gender, medical knowledge and power structures in the process of Chinese medicine modernization, as well as the exploration path of women’s professionalization in the Republican era.