Yubin Shen

This dissertation explores the origin and development of tropical medicine in twentieth- century China. Based on multinational archives, it argues that tropical medicine’s emergence as a distinct discipline in China is neither a product of colonial expansion, nor merely an agenda of modern nation-state building, as its Euro-American-Japanese counterparts have been regarded in the history of medicine, but rather results from complicated global networks of different groups of actors, including Chinese/foreign regimes, institutions, physicians, and merchants, serving different agendas. By bringing the global network perspective into my analysis, this dissertation also attempts to further broaden our understanding of twentieth-century China in global perspective.