On the Margins of Science: “Making Chinese Medicine Scientific” Movement in 1930s and 1940s

Jian Meng, University of New Mexico

When a marginalized knowledge tradition is excluded from the dominant definition of “science,” how do its practitioners respond? The concept of boundary-work, foundational to science and technology studies, has provided powerful tools for analyzing how dominant groups demarcate science from non-science. However, it has less to say about what happens on the other side of the boundary—among those whom the demarcation is designed to exclude. This article recovers the epistemic responses of Chinese medicine practitioners who, during the Republican-era “Making Chinese Medicine Scientific” movement in 1930s and 1940s, refused to accept their exclusion from science and undertook what I call boundary-crossing work—the strategic and contested practice of dual redefining “science” and "Chinese medicine" to forge epistemic pathways across the boundary established by biomedicine. Drawing on 116 articles from Chinese medical periodicals, this article categorizes three main forms of boundary-crossing work: Pragmatists redefined science as therapeutic efficacy and Chinese medicine as an extensive clinical archive; Westernizers conceptualized science as positivist analysis and Chinese medicine as a repository of empirical materials; Rationalists interpreted science as systematic reasoning and Chinese medicine as an obscured theoretical system awaiting purification. These divergent epistemic practices not only challenged biomedical hegemony but also contributed to the pluralistic landscape of medicine in China. By shifting analytical attention from boundary-work to boundary-crossing work, this concept invites a reorientation in the study of demarcation between science and non-science by illuminating the epistemic agency of the marginalized epistemic groups, and by revealing that the outcome of epistemic contests is not necessarily demarcation but may be pluralization.

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 Presented in Session 51. Disease Ecologies, Notions of Modernity, and Conceptions of Illness