Y. L. Lucy Wang

This project charts a history of plague, tuberculosis, general hygiene, and their impacts on the architecture of greater China. It marks the first monograph to study biomedicine as a throughline in the built environment of the region, which was then regarded as a “dongfang bingfu 東方病夫 (Sick Man of the Far East).” Tracing a conflation of medical and civilizational sickness, as well as of the body and the body politic, this research shows how medical experts and professional architects managed outbreaks and modulated between tradition and modernity in the age of germ theory.