In this lucid and captivating study, Nguyen draws on a wide range of colonial-era sources in both French and Vietnamese to uncover a never-before told story about the deiversity of everyday experiences that shaped the delivery of infant and maternal health care in early twentieth-century Vietnam.
SOCIAL HISTORY OF MEDICINE
[A] cogently argued and effectively documented study . ... Read more. . One of the great strengths of this work is the way in which women's own testimony is brought to light. But this is far from being a doctrinaire study of race, exploitation, and resistance. What Nguyen does so effectively is to present a complex and evolving historical and social trajectory in which it is not only the French who moved. Vietnamese society itself became more diverse and pluralistic: the old, the new, and the in-between coexisted.
ISIS
Childbirth, Maternity, and Medical Pluralism in French Colonial Vietnam, 1880-1945 will be of interest to a range of scholars: those interested in the link between colonial medicine and empire building; the tensions inherent in introducing and implementing western biomedical values and practices in non-western medical contexts; how race, class, gender, and religious and cultural values inflect medical practitioners' (both French and Vietnamese) provision of health care; the social and administrative processes through which plural medical systems emerge; how the Vietnamese have incorporated and transformed values and practices from elsewhere for their own benefit; and early examples of how Vietnamese women's personal private reproductive lives became of concern to the state.
MEDICAL HISTORY
This study, which traces the history of the introduction of Western obstetrical medicine in Vietnam, is a timely contribution to the field of colonial gender studies. . . . The strength of the book lies in its use of both French and Vietnamese sources to illustrate the cultural differences between colonizers and colonized over childbirth, mothering, and infant care.
FRENCH STUDIES
Childbirth, Maternity, and Medical Pluralism in French Vietnam, 1880-1945 is well written and grounded with strong empirical sources. . . . I recommend this book for both undergraduate and graduate classes on the history of science, women's health, and imperialism.
JOURNAL OF SOCIAL HISTORY
Show Less