Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China

When American diplomatic delegations traveled to the People's Republic of China during the 1970s, they were deeply impressed by rural medicine in the Maoist state. Physician Victor Sidel spoke glowingly of “barefoot doctors,” health workers who had received minimal training in Chinese and Western medicine and who performed basic medical care in rural areas (Victor W. Sidel, “The Barefoot Doctors of the People's Republic of China,” New England Journal of Medicine 286 [1972], 1292–300). But Fang Xiaoping argues in his excellent new book that barefoot doctors were more than just a scattered collection of individual health workers. Western medicine came to dominate rural China during the socialist era from 1949 to 1976, and barefoot doctors were critical agents of this transformation. Fang uses oral interviews and archival documents to build a case study of rural medicine in Jiang Village, outside the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province. In providing an in-depth study of the barefoot doctors, Fang makes an important contribution to the work of Kim Taylor, Miriam Gross, Sydney White, and other scholars of medicine in the early People's Republic of China. Fang's discussion of competition and cooperation among Western, Chinese, and folk medical traditions in Zhejiang also offers a useful meditation on issues of medical pluralism in the Chinese context, following the work of Arthur Kleinman.