Needham Research Institute Series
About the Book Series
Joseph Needham's 'Science and Civilisation' series began publication in the 1950s. At first, it was seen as a piece of brilliant but isolated pioneering. However, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is clear that Needham's work has succeeded in creating a vibrant new intellectual field in the West. The books in this series cover topics relating broadly to the practice of science, technology and medicine in East Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The emphasis is on traditional forms of knowledge and practice, but without excluding modern studies which connect the topics with their historical and cultural context.
Disability and Impairment in Early China: Other Bodies
1st Edition
Edited
By Avital H. Rom
March 31, 2025
This book is the first collection of scholarly works fully dedicated to exploring disability and impairment in early Chinese history. Early Chinese understandings of disability are effectively revealed through investigations of a wide range of aspects, such as terminological, legal, political, and ...
Renaming Plants and Nations in Japanese Colonial Korea
1st Edition
By Jung Lee
March 04, 2025
This book studies a striking example of intensely negotiated colonial scientific practice: the case of botanical practice in Korea during the Japanese colonization from 1910 to 1945. The shared aim of botanists who encountered one another in colonial Korea to practice “modern Western botany” is ...
Bamboo in Vietnam: An Anthropological and Historical Approach
1st Edition
By Đinh Trọng Hiếu, Emmanuel Poisson
January 30, 2025
This book presents interdisciplinary research on bamboo in Vietnam, drawing on the anthropology of gesture, ethnobotany and the history of technology. The authors have adopted a technological approach which reviews how the terminology of different parts of the bamboo plant in the dictionaries in ...
The Chinese Astronomical Bureau, 1620–1850: Lineages, Bureaucracy and Technical Expertise
1st Edition
By Ping-Ying Chang
May 27, 2024
This book offers a new insight into one of the most interesting and long-lived institutions known to historians of science, the Chinese imperial Astronomical Bureau, which for two millennia observed, recorded, interpreted and predicted the movements of the celestial bodies. Utilising archival ...
Asian Medical Industries: Contemporary Perspectives on Traditional Pharmaceuticals
1st Edition
Edited
By Stephan Kloos, Calum Blaikie
September 25, 2023
This book develops the concept of Asian Medical Industries as a novel perspective on traditional Asian medicines. Complementing and updating existing work in this field, the book provides a critical and comparative analytic framework for understanding Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, Sowa Rigpa, and ...
The Politics of Chinese Medicine Under Mongol Rule
1st Edition
By Reiko Shinno
May 25, 2017
Under the rule of the descendants of Chinggis Khan (1167-1227), China saw the development of a new culture in which medical practice came to be considered a highly respected occupation for elite men. During this period, further major steps were also taken towards the codification of medical ...
Reviving Ancient Chinese Mathematics: Mathematics, History and Politics in the Work of Wu Wen-Tsun
1st Edition
By Jiri Hudecek
May 24, 2017
Twentieth-century China has been caught between a desire to increase its wealth and power in line with other advanced nations, which, by implication, means copying their institutions, practices and values, whilst simultaneously seeking to preserve China’s independence and historically formed ...
Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan
1st Edition
By Charlotte Verschuer, Wendy Cobcroft
May 24, 2017
The majority of studies on the agricultural history of Japan have focused on the public administration of land and production, and rice, the principal source of revenue, has received the most attention. However, while this cereal has clearly played a decisive role in the public economy of the ...
A Chinese Physician: Wang Ji and the Stone Mountain Medical Case Histories
1st Edition
By Joanna Grant
September 11, 2014
A Chinese Physician is the portrait of a 16th century medical writer and clinical practitioner. Drawing on socio-economic/biographic, textual, and gender analysis along side a variety of sources, from hagiographical biographies to medical case histories, the book tells three very different but ...
Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the Stars
1st Edition
By Ho Peng Yoke
October 23, 2013
Though there are a number of well-written works on Chinese divination, there are none that deal with the three sophisticated devices that were employed by the Chinese Astronomical Bureau in the eleventh century and for hundreds of years thereafter. Chinese experts applied the methods associated ...
Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China
1st Edition
By Marta Hanson
January 29, 2013
This book traces the history of the Chinese concept of "Warm diseases" (wenbing) from antiquity to the SARS epidemic. Following wenbing from its birth to maturity and even life in modern times Marta Hanson approaches the history of Chinese medicine from a new angle. She explores the possibility of ...
Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963: A Medicine of Revolution
1st Edition
By Kim Taylor
November 25, 2011
Using original sources, this significant text looks at the transformation of Chinese medicine from a marginal, side-lined medical practice of the early twentieth century, to an essential and high-profile part of the national health-care system under the Chinese Communist Party. The political, ...