The InternetThe Archive, Medical Heritage Library TAMARA VENIT SHELTON

Curiosity or Cure?

Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism in Progressive Era California and Oregon

STUDENTS OF OREGON’S HISTORY may be well acquainted with the story of Ing Hay, purveyor of Kam Wah Chung & Co., a Chinese apothecary T. Foo Yuen (right), President of the Foo & Wing Herb Company, and his son in the town of John Day. From 1887 to 1948, Kam Wah Chung & Co. served Tom How Wing (center) diagnosed the pulse of friend W.A. Hallowell. The photo both Chinese and Euro-American patrons hailing from eastern Oregon, appeared in Li Wing’s 326-page promotional pamphlet The Science of Oriental southern Washington, and parts of Idaho. Doc Hay — as he was known Medicine, Diet, and Hygiene in 1902. to patients — diagnosed illnesses, dispensed herbs, and sold sundry goods imported from China. Hay was one of many Chinese doctors who began immigrating to the United States with the first waves of their countrymen herbalists tended to be among the best-educated of the immigrants and the during the 1850s. Most Chinese immigrant enclaves had at least one person most likely to forge ties with Euro-American and other non-Chinese neigh- acting as the community doctor, whether self-taught or formally trained, bors and patients. As a result, Chinese doctors were often able to avoid the and their status as merchants protected them from the Chinese Exclusion worst of racist exploitation and oppression. Their extraordinary experiences Act of 1882 that barred immigration by laborers.1 provide the counterpoint to the dominant narrative of anti-Chinese racism Taking a page from Horatio Alger, biographers of Chinese immigrant and exclusion in United States history.4 doctors tend to depict them as men who surmounted anti-Asian racism to Yet a simple triumph-over-adversity narrative does not tell us much become leaders in their communities, respected by their Euro-American about the actual strategies that Chinese doctors deployed to secure allies in a neighbors, and financially successful.2 Recent scholarship by historians hostile environment and stave off the most energetic campaigns against them Haiming Liu and William M. Bowen, for example, has drawn together dis- during the Progressive Era. Beginning in the 1890s and accelerating during parate local histories of individual practitioners to suggest commonalities the first decades of the twentieth century, the American Medical Association in their experiences and the significance of Chinese apothecaries to Asian (AMA) joined forces with state and local governments to drive unlicensed American history. As Liu summarizes: “By examining the history of herbal doctors — including Chinese herbalists — out of business.5 Between 1915 medicine in America we learn to appreciate the open, engaged, and cosmo- and 1929, Ing Hay was the target of a series of indictments for practicing politan nature of Chinese American life.”3 Liu and Bowen note that Chinese medicine without a license. (Each time, with the help of sympathetic jurists, the charges were dismissed.)6 Focusing on California and Oregon, two of Research for this article was supported by the Oregon Historical Society’s Donald J. the states with the largest Chinese immigrant populations during the late Sterling, Jr., Memorial Senior Research Fellowship. nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article examines representa-

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 © 2013 Oregon Historical Society Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  Library of Congress, of Division, Prints & Photographs Library LC-USZ62-104223 the 1890s, state medical boards com- posed of AMA-approved physicians administered mandatory licensing exams that focused on recent medi- cal science and pharmacology. At the same time, new laws empowered states and counties to impose fines and jail time on doctors practicing Courtesy of Kam Wah Chung Museum Chung Wah Courtesy of Kam without a license.9 The 1910 publi- cation of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Flexner Report, a survey of medical education in America, helped legiti- mate and galvanize the AMA’s mis- sion to standardize a science-based medical curriculum. The foundation inspected and scored 155 American and Canadian medical schools, both orthodox and unorthodox, reserving Kam Wah Chung & Co., shown here in a 1909 photograph, was located in the Abraham Flexner (pictured in Chinese district of John Day, Oregon, which was home to five or six hundred the report’s most scathing criticisms 1895) authored a 1910 report for inhabitants in the 1880s. Drawn to eastern Oregon by a mining boom, Chinese for eclectic, homeopathic, and osteo- the Carnegie Foundation for the immigrants used Kam Wah Chung & Co. as a meeting place, post office, and pathic institutions.10 In response, Advancement of Teaching. The apothecary. numerous medical schools closed, Flexner Report surveyed medical merged, or reorganized to reduce the education in the United States and tions of Chinese medicine during a period of increasing regulatory scrutiny number of students and elevate the helped justify increased regulation of the medical profession according to and asks how such representations differentiated “regular” from “irregular” requirements for admission, training, strict, science-based guidelines. medicine.7 It argues that Chinese doctors made the practice of irregular and graduation.11 medicine a central component of their appeal to white patients. Ironically, AMA physicians pursued an then, Chinese doctors found themselves defending their practices in the aggressive campaign against irregular very language used to attack them. doctors because there was so little popular consensus about whether “scien- The AMA-government partnership to crack down on irregular doctors tific” medicine was actually superior to other practices. Across the public, was, in many ways, a continuation of the AMA’s long-standing mission. faith in science competed with a host of other preferences and fears. Despite Since its founding in 1847, the organization had endeavored to discredit real improvements in science-based medicine and surgery, early-twentieth- what it deemed unscientific medical practices through various strategies, century patients still associated regular doctors with harsh emetics and risky including penalizing its members for collaborating with irregular doc- operations.12 Irregular doctors tended toward less invasive procedures and tors.8 As a private and voluntary association, the AMA had limited coercive often prescribed herbal medicines similar to the homegrown remedies many power, but the political culture of the Progressive Era, with its impulse patients already found familiar.13 Hay’s Euro-American patients often came toward bureaucracy, created opportunities for the AMA to extend its reach. to him after their self-fashioned treatments failed. When seeking help for her A widening acceptance for the germ theory of disease, which had yielded daughter’s infected finger, for example, Mrs. Fred Deardorff wrote: “I have advancements for regular doctors in surgery and the containment of infec- been using flax seed poultis [sic] and white of egg but without much results.”14 tious diseases, lent justification to the regulatory movement. Beginning in Another of Hay’s patients, Mrs. M.J. Baker of Burns, Oregon, suffered from

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  rous, decadent and effeminate, served as justification for exclusionary and discriminatory practices and policies.17 For white Americans who believed Chinese were racially inferior, it was no stretch to impose the same stereo- types onto Chinese herbal remedies. Attacks on Chinese medicine ridiculed the practice as anti-modern or unscientific and, at best, suited only to serve women’s medical problems. Yet, American Orientalism’s presumption of Asian racial inferiority went hand-in-hand with an attraction to East Asian arts, material culture, Courtesy of Kam Wah Chung Museum Chung Wah Courtesy of Kam and philosophy. As historian Henry Yu noted in Thinking Orientals, Asians in America “have been both valued and denigrated for what was assumed to be different about them.”18 While the American elite had a long history of collecting Chinese and Japanese objects and studying eastern religions, by the end of the nineteenth century, the American fascination with “Ori- entalia” had become a more widespread cultural phenomenon.19 Chinese and Japanese consumer goods were now available to mass markets through mail-order catalogs and department stores. At the same time, world fairs and travelling shows popularized “Oriental” arts, ideas, and religions.20 “Doc” Ing Hay meets with an unidentified woman outside the Kam Wah Chung The contradiction embedded within American Orientalist discourse — building. that Asian exoticism made the race both inferior and desirable — created an opportunity for Chinese doctors in the United States. For patients who a tumor on the left side of her neck. She wrote, beseeching him to treat it distrusted modern medical science, the doctors realized, Chinese medicine’s with herbs: “I would be so glad if you could reduce that as the dr [sic] are perceived otherness could be a mark of superiority to western or regular wanting to cut it out and I have such a dread of the knife.”15 Hay’s patients doctors’ practices. Letters to Hay and other Chinese herbalists from non- may have found his approach more regular and familiar, while surgery and Chinese patients often reflected the hope that their remedies might succeed 21 other scientific practices were more irregular and scary. where non-Chinese doctors had failed. It thus could be advantageous for During the Progressive Era, Chinese doctors became useful subjects for Chinese doctors to adopt the discourse of American Orientalism and use American writers seeking to explain the differences between regular and it to their advantage. Uncertainties about modern medical science and irregular medicine. By their own admission, Chinese doctors were trained American Orientalist attitudes formed both the basis of attacks on Chinese in ancient healing arts that bore little resemblance to modern, scientific medicine as well as its defense. medicine. Although health practices in China varied from drug therapy to Portrayals of Chinese medicine by non-Chinese writers did double duty. acupuncture to mystical healing, practitioners in the United States tended They were, at the surface, studies of an exotic culture, and they reinforced to focus on diagnosis by pulse (or pulsology) and herbal remedies.16 Thus, racist assumptions about Chinese immigrants. More fundamentally, they Chinese medicine became a perfect foil to the AMA-sanctioned scientific reflected anxieties and uncertainties, particularly about modern medical medicine. science. An 1869 Overland Monthly article, “Medical Art in the Chinese Descriptions of Chinese medicine drew on American Orientalist ideas Quarter,” introduced Chinese medicine to readers so as to instruct them and attitudes. American Orientalism was a popular discourse that developed in the very latest in regular medical science. Written by Rev. A.W. Loomis, in the context of trade and diplomatic relations between the United States a former missionary to China and frequent contributor to the magazine and China over the course of the nineteenth century and that linked unequal on matters related to Chinese immigrant life and culture in San Francisco, power relations between West and East to the presumed racial inferiority the article described Chinese medicine as based more in mysticism than of Asian races. American perceptions of Asians as backwards and barba- scientific evidence:

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  So much study by so many learned men on one subject; so many thousands — yea, Philip Choy Courtesy of millions — of life-times spent in this study since the days of Noah until now, it might reasonably be supposed ought to have brought this science in China to a high state of perfection; but such is not the fact. . . . There still remains a higher veneration for ancient than for modern discoveries, and the more smoky, thumb-worn, and worm-eaten a doctor’s library appears, the more reverence, other things being equal, will usually be accorded to his opinions. According to Loomis, superstition prevented Chinese doctors from acquiring knowledge of anatomy or chemistry. Internal organs, nerves, and vessels, the author claimed, were “terra incognita” to doctors whose veneration for the intact human body prevented them from dissecting even post-mortem. Loomis described the Chinese theory of anatomical correspondences and channels well enough to explain the basis of pulsology, but he summarily dismissed the practice as insufficient for diagnosis: “None but quacks . . . pretend to trust entirely to the pulse.”Disparaging pulsology provided an opportunity for Loomis to educate readers on modern medical diagnosis: “The regular faculty speak of four methods by which the diagnosis must be obtained, viz.: 1st. By observation . . . 2d. By hearing . . . 3d. By questions . . . and 4th. The pulse.”Loomis concluded his exposé of Chinese medical arts by The above image from about 1900 shows one of the many apothecaries in San cautioning readers against forsaking “the new theories and freshly discovered Francisco’s Chinatown. The herbalists behind the counter filled prescriptions by medicines of the young nations of the West, for the theories which wise selecting from hundreds of herbs contained in the many containers and drawers men of the East in the ages long ago invented.”22 Even Chinese immigrants lining the walls. This image was featured on a postcard, suggesting the popularity of to San Francisco, he claimed, once introduced to the “American” science of visiting such a shop on a tour of Chinatown in the early twentieth century. medicine, preferred regular doctors for treatment. Although other late-nineteenth-century accounts did not make such overt comparisons with regular medicine, they repeated the notion that Chinese medicine was more a curiosity than a science. The intent may have drawer] is divided into four equal compartments, one containing partially been to entertain a non-Chinese audience of readers, but the effect was to charred bones of lions and tigers; another dried bugs . . . a third, some lentil- emphasize the arcane and exotic, reinforcing American Orientalist attitudes. like seeds; and the fourth, small fragments of bark.” The presumptuous The apothecary, with its jumble of jars containing mysterious ingredients, officer continued opening drawers with no indicated permission from the featured prominently in late-nineteenth-century travel accounts to Chinese shopkeeper while Ames marveled at their contents: rhinoceros-horn shav- ethnic enclaves. The Chinese formulary was especially interesting to writers ings, elephant’s skin, “and the gallipots — quaint little earthen vessels with touring Chinatown in the late nineteenth century. red labels in character — contain such sovereign remedies as alligator’s gall, In 1875, Lippincott’s Magazine published a description of Chinese medi- ass’s glue, the flesh of dogs, and many other specifics that a scientific mind cine in San Francisco as part of a “stroll” through Chinatown. The author, alone could appreciate.”Later, gazing upon medical charts of the human body J.W. Ames, professed no special knowledge of Chinese culture and engaged a with bemusement, Ames remarked on the visual depiction of the Chinese policeman to escort him through the darker byways, into restaurants, opium theory of channels: “something not greatly unlike viscera were plentifully dens, and the apothecary of famed physician Li Po Tai. Ames seemed at first arranged in regular rows of parallels and generously piled up almost to taken aback by the banality of the shop’s appearance, which looked to him the chin. For such an internal economy no doubt the mixed tigers’ bones like any other drugstore with its drawers and jars, but once the policeman and tumblebugs are tonic and effectual.”He also noted the work of Tai’s opened a drawer for Ames’s inspection, the difference was apparent: “[The apprentice, “naked to the waist . . . compounding some witch’s brew.”Ames

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  reported that he left the shop, not with courteous thanks, but with a cry of the National Health, MedicineCourtesy of Institue of Collection of the History Images of terror: “We closed the door with a bang and ran howling to the open air.”23 The fascination with the Chinese formulary continued into the early twentieth century. In 1903, when the San Francisco Chronicle shadowed Hop Lee as he hunted for and processed horned toads for his pharmacy, the reporter described the interior of a “typical” Chinese druggist: “If one takes the trouble or has the impertinence to peek into the shanties in the Chinese quarters of either San Francisco or Los Angeles, he will invariably discover what at first glance appears to be a collection of preserved fruit, but which on closer inspection proves to be canned toads, centipedes, rattlesnakes, worms, scorpions, and bugs.”24 In 1907, the Los Angeles Times cautioned its readers: “Those who make wry faces at swallowing a blue mass or castor oil may find relief in knowing what the sick Chinaman swallows.” The reporter went on to list Chinese materia medica derived from miner- als, vegetables, animals, and even the human body.25 Articles about Chinese doctors often dwelled on A postcard from the early 1900s depicts the interior of a “Chinese Drugstore” in San their perceived connection Francisco’s Chinatown. to a criminal underworld. Real and imagined connec-

Courtesy of Kam Wah Chung Museum Chung Wah Courtesy of Kam tions between Chinese herbs The article went on to describe a special “Golden Silkworm . . . reared by and death-by-poisoning miscreants” in the southern provinces and the preferred method of suicide made for exciting newspa- among wealthy Chinese men — swallowing gold or silver to effect suffocation per copy and confirmed or internal bleeding.26 San Francisco’s Daily Call attributed the murder of stereotypes that associated Chinatown doctor Ng See Poy to so-called “Chinese highbinders,” a secret Chinese with barbarity. In society of Chinese American assassins, blackmailers, and assorted criminals.27 1883, the New York Times Reports of unpalatable ingredients and dubious morality did not seem published an article on a to diminish the popularity of Chinese medicine, which continued to attract “Coroners’ Manual” that Euro-American patients, much to the consternation of its critics. How outlined Chinese methods could something so barbaric, so retrograde, appeal to civilized Americans? of murder and suicide by English-language newspapers found their answer in American Oriental- poison: “The common- ist stereotypes: If Chinese doctors were innately deviant, so must be their est poisons are said to be patients. When Louis Potter, a prominent New York sculptor, died in Seattle opium, arsenic, and certain in 1912, the coroner identified the culprit as poison extracted from peach noxious essences derived trees and prescribed by a Chinese doctor. Articles about Potter’s death lin- Mortars and pestles were used to prepare herbal from herbs. But besides gered over the “mystical” details of Chinese medicine. “Potter,” the reporter remedies at Kam Wah Chung & Co. (The photo these other things are taken lamented, “apparently had great faith in his oriental physician.” The article was taken after the building was made a historic by suicides and given by went on to describe the state of the body: “Dr. Snyder [the coroner] said that landmark and restored in the 1970s.) murderers to cause death.” in addition to the abrasions of the skin into which the oriental herbs were

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  rubbed and a strong plaster applied, Potter apparently had been taking a The article implied that this susceptibility revealed their innate feminine strong medicine. . . . Six large bottles of the black fluid had been consumed weakness and irrationality and their inability to make sound decisions for in eight days. The Coroner has not determined the nature of the concoc- their health care. tion.”28 The intrigue was only compounded by the presence of a “mysterious After a wave of arrests of Chinese doctors practicing medicine without companion,” a woman who would not divulge her identity but who admitted a license in Los Angeles County, coverage of the trials became opportuni- that she was not the sculptor’s wife: “The Coroner described the woman ties for newspapers to underscore the exoticism and gendered deviance of as ‘apparently highly intellectual’.”29 Newspapers covering the Potter death the “irregular” physicians. The Los Angeles Times reported the arrest and subtly intimated a link between dangerous Chinese medicine and a dissolute arraignment of Tom Leung, “the millionaire Chinese doctor” and proprietor lifestyle of artists and “intellectuals.” The implication was that unwholesome of the Leung Herb Company of Los Angeles. The article lingered over the and unconventional characters patronized Chinese doctors. details of Leung’s appearance (“faultlessly dressed, wearing a frock coat and Attacks on Chinese doctors often became attacks on their female clientele, silk hat”) and soberly noted: “Women have been used to get evidence.”34 reflecting common anxieties about independent women during the Progres- When Leung was arrested yet again a few years later, the same newspaper sive Era. During the first decades of the twentieth century, American women lavished attention on the “fancy costumes” worn by Leung and his fellow — especially among the white middle class — achieved greater education physicians: “The Chinese were arrayed in robes of wonderful richness, and and professional prominence. That pattern held true in both California and the appointments of the rooms carried the impression of Oriental mystery.”35 Oregon, where women’s increasing role in public affairs was evident not only In a 1907 sting operation conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department, among middle-class women, who helped lead the fight for equal suffrage a “woman detective” went undercover to get evidence that G.S. Chan was in California in 1911 and in Oregon in 1912, but also among working-class prescribing medicine without a license. The detective became more of a women, who participated in major strikes of textile workers, restaurant curiosity for the newspaper than the Chinese herbalist, who turned out workers, telephone operators, and glove makers.30 Women’s visibility and to be far less exotic than the spectators attending the trial hoped he would power sparked the creation of anti-suffrage leagues and other anti-feminist be. Chan arrived in court “attired in garments of the latest fashion. . . . The organizations, all united by fears that women’s rights to self-assertion in spectators looked for the long, plaited hair and swishy clothes and were . . . political, economic, and personal affairs would subvert traditional male disappointed.” Bessie K. Hall, the undercover detective, however, happily authority.31 provided salacious detail for the newspaper, which reported that she “was Female patronage of Chinese doctors seemed like evidence of that sub- married in Bakersfield but has not been living with her husband for some versive trend. In 1907, the Los Angeles Times reported contemptuously on years past.”36 Extraneous information about dress and marital status became women’s affinity for Chinese doctors: a kind of rhetorical shorthand that allowed writers to convey the gender and racial deviance of Chinese physicians and their patients. The oriental “healer” business has increased wonderfully in Los Angeles in the last three Chinese medicine did have some defenders in the English-language years. Chinese “physicians” who formerly were barely able to make a living, came here and press, but they also tended to rely on the well-rehearsed tropes of American waxed fat and rich. The places conducted by some of these smooth-tongued Celestials Orientalist discourse. In an 1899 article for Lippincott’s Magazine, William have been patronized largely by women. They seem to find something “romantic” in visiting the yellow quacks and having a “doctor” with long finger nails, a little round, Tisdale decried journalists who described Chinese physicians in terms more black cap, with a red topknot, and loose, flowing robes, “prescribe” for their ills.32 befitting a haunted house than a place of business: The Los Angeles Times’ depiction of the apothecary managed to mock both Newspaper writers in search of a sensation . . . thread narrow alleys and climb dark stairways to find him in his secluded den, and relate thrilling stories of wrinkled mum- Chinese physicians and their white, female patients. Chinese doctors were mies who felt their quickly-beating pulses and wrote prescriptions for sharks’ fins, or foppish and effeminate, and their patients were fools. Decadence and luxury spiders’ eggs, or dried toads and lizards. These fairy tales go the rounds and are read by hinted at something nefarious and duplicitous: “Most of these places are thousands who shudder at their imaginary horrors.37 beautifully furnished with oriental draperies, teak-wood furniture, Chinese porcelains, and other fittings calculated to create an impression of culture Tisdale was careful to distinguish trained Chinese physicians from pretend- and wealth.”33 Female patients were, in effect, entranced by Chinese doctors. ers, and he spoke highly of diagnosis by pulse: “Whether it is based on some

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  The InternetThe Archive, Medical Heritage Library form of chicanery or upon science, it is certainly successful.”38 Yet, even as Tisdale commended Chinese medicine for its efficacy, he could not resist embellishing his praise with references to the mystical and supernatural. The ability to diagnose by pulse, he claimed, was “analogous to the sixth sense which the blind sometimes possess.”39 Tisdale’s article alternated between describing the apothecary as an ordinary, American doctor’s office and lingering on the most exotic details of the doctor’s costume and herbal for- mulary, indicating a fundamental uncertainty about how to extol the virtues of Chinese medicine: Did it work because it was like American medicine or because it was not? Tisdale’s ambivalence was reflected in how he excerpted his interviews with white patients. He included the full gamut of responses, from those who “freely assert that the Chinese system of medicine is more rational” than regular medicine to those who marveled at what “these degraded heathen can do with their herbs, which our own doctors with all their skill and knowledge cannot.”40 Tisdale found ways to promote Chinese medicine by both denying and affirming its racial otherness. Defenders of Chinese medicine, thus, could use the vocabulary of American Orientalism to signal its distance from modern medical practice and its more dubious innovations. In addition to court proceedings and newspaper interviews, Chinese doctors in California and Oregon spoke publicly for their own practices through printed advertisements, where they had the most control over their message. Doctors could convey the nature of their work through self-selected words and images. Typically, advertisements underscored the effectiveness and safety of Chinese herbal remedies. Most advertisements featured a photograph of the physician, usually wearing distinctly Chinese garb but sometimes dressed in a western coat and tie.41 Many included fawning tes- timonials from white patients recounting near-miraculous cures through the application of herbal remedies. In short- and long-form advertisements, Chinese doctors consciously employed and reinterpreted racist stereotypes used by their attackers. Li Wing, for example, published in 1902 The Science of Oriental Medicine, Diet, and Hygiene, a 326-page advertisement for his Chinese pharmacy in Los Angeles, the Foo & Wing Herb Company. Using the word science in its title, The Science of Oriental Medicine aimed to dispel the stereotypes that Chinese medicine was behind the times and its doctors barbaric, but it did so in an unexpected way: The book embraced backwardness and barbarism as virtues, not weaknesses. The Science of Oriental Medicine introduced readers to the The “Twelve Pulse [sic] of the Human Body,” in The Science of Oriental Medicine Oriental system of medicine, including how its general principles and treat- illustrates tweleve vital organs within the human body and their corresponding ments compared to American medicine.42 According to Li, the “science” of The pulses. Chinese doctors examine patients’ pulses to determine the condition of the Science of Oriental Medicine was based on ancient and seemingly inhumane vital organs and the person’s overall health.

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  vital organs such as the kidneys, the liver, the stomach, the spleen, and the heart were studied in the living person. The intensely important questions involved in the digestion LA Times LA of foods were determined as well as the effects of different drugs. These investigations, made while the man was still alive, were a thousand times more thorough and reliable than the guesswork which civilized physicians have practiced for many years by cut- ting up the bodies of dead men, when heat, motion, and life are gone and death has destroyed every function.43

In reality, Chinese doctors LA Times probably did not perform vivisections on condemned criminals or anyone else; early Chinese medical texts, like non-Chinese medical texts of the same era, relied on postmortem analysis of internal organs.44 Never- theless, the effect of such an anecdote might have been both shocking and com- forting for potential white patients. Chinese doctors, supposedly racially inclined A 1904 advertisement for the Foo & Wing Herb toward barbarity, had used Co. shows diagnosis by pulse. The drawing was their unsavory predilec- based on a photograph originally printed in tion for the advancement The Science of Oriental Medicine, Diet, and Hygiene. of medical science. They could, therefore, compre- hend what civility and morality prevented regular, Euro-American doctors from comprehending: how medications actually worked on the living body. A 1912 advertisement for the Foo & Wing Herb Co. targeted Euro-American women Similarly, advertisements for Chinese doctors played on racist assump- patients by dispelling any fears of impropriety associated with diagnosis by pulse. tions about their effeminacy. Where critics of Chinese medicine saw gender deviance, Chinese doctors saw business opportunities and deliberately targeted female patients in their advertisements. In the case of doctors and brothers T. Foo Yuen and Tom Leung in Los Angeles, most early-twentieth- practices. Counter to prevailing myths that the Chinese did not understand century advertisements they published in the Los Angeles Times showed a how the human body worked, The Science of Oriental Medicine insisted that doctor in traditional Chinese garb, seated and practicing diagnosis by pulse their anatomical knowledge was superior to that of regular, American doctors (pulsology) on a white male patient. The drawing reproduced a photograph because Chinese doctors dissected live humans, not cadavers: that appeared in The Science of Oriental Medicine, and it inspired a nearly When the Chinese commenced to study medicine they went at once to the root of dif- identical advertisement featuring a drawing of a white woman. The patient is ferent questions involved by practicing vivisection. Thousands of condemned criminals clothed in attire and coiffed in a way that bespeaks of Victorian affluence and were taken and cut to pieces for the benefit of the living. In this way the functions of the respectability.45 There is no hint of impropriety in the relationship between

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  skating, and “Margaret” looking regal in finely draped robes and upswept hair. These were not images of the eastern Oregon ranching and farm wives who patronized Kam Wah Chung & Co. but perhaps representations of what they aspired to be. It is difficult to determine how successful these images were at drawing women to Chinese medicine, but we can tell from patient letters that Hay likely served more female patients than male.47 Perhaps such images of sophistication and affluence appealed to Hay’s non-Chinese clientele, who tended to come from eastern Oregon merchant, farming, and Courtesy of Kam Wah Chung Museum Chung Wah Courtesy of Kam ranching families with some wealth. Some of his patients had descended from the most prominent pioneers of Grant County and its neighboring counties, including the Deardorffs, the Keerins, the Van Bibbers, and one- time Mayor of Burns, Oregon, J.C. Welcome, among others. The middling status of these non-Chinese patients is not surprising; the initial visit and diagnosis cost $25, and patients typically paid anywhere between $7.50 and $15.00 for a supply of medicine to last them two weeks.48 In longer form advertisements, both Li Wing in Los Angeles and C. Gee Wo in Portland spoke directly to female patients through promotional books. Their depiction of femininity was much narrower than that of Kam Wah Chung & Co.’s business cards and conformed more closely to the old-fashioned Victorian ideal of “true womanhood,” which identified domesticity (along with piety, purity, and submissiveness) as the source of women’s social power and moral authority. While a woman might express her domesticity as a wife, daughter, or sister, the mother was the ultimate 49 Examples of Kam Wah Chung & Co.’s business cards, featuring “Dorothy” and manifestation of Victorian femininity. In advertisements targeting English- “Clara,” were intended to appeal to the apothecary’s Euro-American, female speaking clientele, Wing and Wo appealed to that tradition by highlighting clientele. Chinese medicine’s capacity to restore fertility to women.50 Li’s The Science of Oriental Medicine included a chapter specifically addressing “The Diseases of Women” in which he decried gynecological the male Chinese doctor and female white patient. Whereas in the original surgeries as “a fad pure and simple.”51 The Science of Oriental Medicine ad, the male patient and doctor’s faces were slightly turned in, suggesting emphasized herbs’ capacity to defend natural womanhood against “mod- the possibility of making eye contact, the female patient and her doctor ern ways of life.”52 Wing attributed women’s ailments — such as irregular connect only at the wrist. The woman’s face is tilted toward her doctor, but periods to cancers — to excessive food, alcohol, and parties; “overwork” the doctor looks out toward the viewer and unquestionably does not meet and anxiety; and the use of contraceptives, which The Science of Oriental her gaze. Diagnosis by pulse required no disrobing, no intimate touching, Medicine called “various perversions of marriage.”53 Chinese herbs, Wing and — as this particular ad suggested — not even locking eyes. claimed, were “particularly adapted” to counter the poisonous effects of Business cards from the 1910s advertising Kam Wah Chung & Co. likewise modern living and modern medicine.54 appealed to female clientele and their desires. In the advertisements, Kam Wo’s Things Chinese, a hundred-page book that publicized his office and Wah Chung & Co. was not just selling “medical herbs, groceries, Chinese herb shop in downtown Portland, similarly denounced modern birth control goods and general merchandise”; it also was selling a vision of modern and other forms of interventionist medicine for their detrimental effects on femininity.46 Each card portrays a white woman: “Lillian” dressed for a women’s health: “Why is it that the women of the twentieth century are not game of golf, “Clara” posing in a fur-trimmed coat, “Dorothy” gaily ice strong, healthy, and robust as the women of the first part of the nineteenth

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  Oregon Historical Society, Collection Ethnology century? And why not mothers of a large family of strong, rosy-cheeked, went about restoring balance and healthy children, as their mothers and grandmothers had been before varied widely depending on 55 them?” The answer, according to Wo, was modern medicine’s tendency to their individual interpretations “unsex” women by encouraging them to interrupt menses, seek abortions, and applications of classical or otherwise alter their reproductive systems. Wo declared that his herbal medical texts.60 In the context remedies could strengthen women’s organs, eliminating menstrual pains of promoting Chinese medicine and tumors and restoring fertility. to American audiences, Wing Advertisements for Chinese medicine also frequently played on seeming and Wo both used nature to cast contradictions, combining characteristics derived from American Orien- doubt on modern medical sci- talism with their opposite. In the discussion of vivisection, for example, ence. In The Science of Oriental readers of The Science of Oriental Medicine learned in later pages that the Medicine, Wing claimed that “condemned criminals” had voted to submit to live vivisection. What might herbal remedies were “founded 56 have seemed barbaric was in fact democratic. More commonly, advertise- upon a complete understand- ments portrayed Chinese herbal remedies as both modern (based on science) ing of Nature’s laws. Americans and old-fashioned (based on ancient folkways). In The Science of Oriental carry their theories of science to Medicine, Wing cited “an exhaustive study” from Berkeley chemistry pro- extremes and get too far away fessor Walter C. Blasdale on the medicinal benefits of Chinese vegetables: from the simple, fundamen- “He believes that many of these will ultimately become of general use and tal facts upon which health of great value to American and European nations.” Wing asserted that the depends.”61 Wo insisted that his knowledge of those healing vegetables was “ancient” but also confirmed by prescriptions were “nature’s 57 a modern scientist, in this case a chemist. Similarly, Portland-based doctor own remedies, and contain no C. Gee Wo advertised that he moved his business to a building that could poisonous minerals or drugs.”62 house his “modern equipment” and laboratory.58 Like The Science of Oriental As in many literary traditions, The back cover of C. Gee Wo’s promotional Medicine, Things Chinese played up the “scientific” aspects of his practice. nature could be an antidote to booklet, Things Chinese, displayed a The fifth edition included an article by a white doctor on the medicinal modernity. photograph of the physician’s disembodied value of vitamins, a recent discovery in 1924: Nature also helped Wing head floating over his newly expanded apothecary located on the corner of Alder Our grandmothers had “herb teas” that shamed the apothecary’s art. The Indians’ and Wo combat sensationalist and Third streets in downtown Portland, “roots and herbs” were the Puritans’ delight. The Chinese have a remarkable faculty descriptions of Chinese apoth- Oregon. for choosing out matchless herbal remedies. At Portland, Oregon the well-known C. ecaries packed with desiccated Gee Wo Chinese Medicine Company has the acme of reputation for giving out the animal and human body parts. very best of such preparations, and best because they are rich in remedial vitamins.59 In Things Chinese, Wo repeat- edly described his ingredients as “roots, bark, herbs, vegetables, and flow- Pairing references to grandmothers, Indians, and Puritans with vitamins ers,” nothing strange or noxious.63 Indeed, most of the Chinese physician’s simultaneously underscored the deep, historical roots of Chinese herbal formulary at this time likely would have been medicinal herbs and vegetables remedies and connected them to Americans’ evolving understanding of with rarer, more expensive ingredients such as deer antler and tiger’s bone diet and nutrition. Chinese herbs were both old-fashioned and newfangled. used only sparingly.64 In The Science of Oriental Medicine, Wing explained The concept of nature helped Wing and Wo articulate the benefits of that Chinese herbs were essentially common vegetables, and consuming their “ancient science.” What was natural or unnatural could have many them was as natural as eating regular food: meanings for Chinese doctors in the early twentieth century. Broadly speak- ing, in the Chinese tradition, nature’s laws balanced the various elements Now compare the use of these substances as medicines with the use of minerals or local believed to control bodily functions. In practice, how Chinese doctors applications of mechanical devices. We can understand how a vegetable substance which

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  is in the nature of a food can be taken into the blood and carried to the weakened portion American public interest in Chinese medicine, particularly acupuncture. of the body which needs special feeding and will there render the necessary assistance. Whereas acupuncture had traditionally served as preventive medicine for But we cannot understand anything of the sort in reference to a mineral which is indi- poor and rural populations unable to afford other treatments, during the gestible or to a poison which is injurious to a well person. Here is the whole difference 1970s and increasingly during the 1980s, acupuncture became a hallmark of in the methods of treatment in a nutshell.65 what anthropologist Mei Zhan has called “hip, middle-class, cosmopolitan 68 Wo described how Chinese herbs were harvested wild and then tended in lifestyles that emphasize overall well-being and mind-body health.” During farmyards “in the same manner as a gardener tends to his choicest flowers.”66 the 1980s and 1990s, schools for Oriental medicine began to open across the Such pastoral images aimed to diminish the exoticism of Chinese herbal United States, with Portland, Oregon, becoming home to two major training remedies. In contrast to the simple cultivation of medicinal herb gardens, centers, the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, founded in 1983, and a the derivation of regular medicine from minerals and metals might have new program in classical Chinese medicine initiated in 1992 at the National 69 seemed strange and potentially dangerous to potential patients. College of Natural Medicine. In the 1990s, Chinese medicine received a Thus, in print advertisements, Chinese doctors crafted an image of further boost when Congress decided to exempt herbal remedies from Food Chinese medicine as based on an ancient science, with herbal remedies that and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation despite pressure from the AMA. were simultaneously familiar and exotic, natural and strange. Where popular Around the same time, the National Institutes of Health established a per- stereotypes denigrated the Chinese by associating them with femininity, manent office for the study of “alternative medicine,” including traditionally 70 Chinese doctors highlighted their close connection with women and special Chinese practices. Since its American renaissance in the 1970s, Chinese knowledge of their ailments. Such was the source of Chinese medicine’s medicine has been the subject of increasing interest among American efficacy, Chinese doctors’ authority, and their superiority to the so-called medical researchers and doctors. It remains to be seen if this attention will regular medicine. lead to greater acceptance for Chinese medicine in mainstream health care. Biographies of Chinese doctors quite rightly marvel at the ability of some That acceptance will have to overcome a long historical campaign to define individuals to form long-standing and successful businesses in the United Chinese medicine in opposition to regular medicine, a campaign in which States. Ing Hay, Li Po Tai, and others weathered economic depressions, anti- Chinese doctors played a significant part. Chinese violence, and other ordeals. They did so not by overcoming racism but rather finding ways to use it to their advantage. American Orientalist tropes of backwardness, barbarity, and effeminacy furnished Chinese doc- tors and their patients with a common language. Although it took some rhetorical effort to transform flaws into features, the ability to speak to and NOTES attract white patients helped Chinese doctors survive and prosper, even in an era of increased regulatory scrutiny and prosecution for practicing 1. irregular medicine. William M. Bowen, “The Five Eras Binford and Mort, 1979); Ramona Kimbrell, of Chinese Medicine in California,” in The “Ah Sang — The Chinese Doctor,” Tales of Yet, the reliance of Chinese doctors on American Orientalist thinking was Chinese in America: A History from Gold the Paradise Ridge, 13:2 (December 1972): a devil’s bargain. Chinese doctors capitalized on their perceived exoticism, Mountain to the Millennium, ed. Susie Lan 25–32; Will Sarvis, “Gifted Healer Ing Hay but in doing so, they limited themselves and their practices to the margins Cassel (Walnut Creek, Cal.: AltaMira Press, and the Chinese Medical Tradition in Eastern of American medicine. With very few exceptions, Chinese herbalists did not 2002), 175. Oregon,” Journal of the West, 44:3 (Summer 2. At present, most of the historical work 2005): 62–69; Aminda M. Smith, “Choosing acquire medical licenses; nor did state boards create alternative examina- on Chinese medicine in the American West Chinese Medicine,” Journal of the West, 46:3 tions for Chinese doctors as they did for other irregular practitioners such has focused on individual doctors and their (Summer 2007): 24–31; and Kenneth H. as homeopaths, chiropractors, and osteopaths.67 By conforming to American shops, including most famously Ing Hay but Marcus and Yong Chen, “Inside and Outside Orientalist expectations, Chinese doctors helped cement their medicine’s also Wah Hing of Fiddletown, California, Chinatown: Chinese Elites in Exclusion Era Ah Fong of Boise, Idaho, and Li Po Tai of California,” Pacific Historical Review, 80:3

marginal status for generations to come. San Francisco, California. See, for example, (August 2011): 369–400. During the 1970s, improved foreign relations with China combined Jeffrey Barlow and Christine Richardson, 3. Haiming Liu, “Chinese Herbalists in with the countercultural embrace of eastern philosophies and renewed China Doctor of John Day (Portland, Ore.: America,” in Chinese American Transna-

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  tionalism: The Flow of People, Resources, ed. become impossible to avoid. For a survey of ern America, ed. Norman Gevitz (Baltimore, Breeding to Ing Hay, May 16, 1941; and Mrs. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia, Penn.: Temple “alternative” medicine and its interactions Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Albert Morse to Ing Hay, December 21, 1941, University Press, 2006), 155. with “regular” or “orthodox medicine” from 14. Mrs. Fred Deardorff to Ing Hay, n.d., Kam Wah Chung Papers, reels 1 and 2. 4. Bowen, “The Five Eras of Chinese the eighteenth century to the near present, Kam Wah Chung Papers [microform], reel 2, 22. Rev. A.W. Loomis, “Medical Art in Medicine in California,” 189–90; Haiming see James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The Oregon Historical Society Research Library, the Chinese Quarter,” Overland Monthly, 2:6 Liu, The Transnational History of a Chinese History of Alternative Medicine in America Portland [hereafter Kam Wah Chung Papers]. (1869): 497–502. Family: Immigrant Letters, Family Business, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 15. Mrs. M.J. Baker to Ing Hay, November 23. J.W. Ames, “A Day in Chinatown,” and Reverse Migration (New Brunswick, 8. Whorton, Nature Cures, 68–69. 3, 1911, Kam Wah Chung Papers, reel 1. See Lippincott’s Magazine, 16 (October 1875): N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Haim- 9. James Gordon Burrow, Organized also James F. Draplan to Ing Hay, October 8, 500–501. ing Liu, “The Resilience of Ethnic Culture: Medicine in the Progressive Era: The Move n.d., Kam Wah Chung Papers, reel 2. 24. “The Pacific Coast Trade in Chinese Chinese Herbalists in the American Medical Toward Monopoly, 12; Whorton, Nature 16. Ted Kaptchuk, O.M.D., The Web That Medicines and How a Celestial Pharmacist Profession,” Journal of Asian American Studies Cures, 135. Has No Weaver (Chicago: Contemporary Makes Drugs Out of Horned Toads,” San (1998): 173–91. 10. Burrow, Orga- Books, 2000), 18–19; Paul S. Unschuld, Medi- Francisco Chronicle Magazine, March 29, 1903. 5. John S. Haller, nized Medicine in the cine in China: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: 25. “Queer Chinese Medicines,” Los Jr., American Medi- Progressive Era, 42–43. University of California Press, 1985), 4–5. Angeles Times, reprinted in the Washington cine in Transition, 11. Haller, Ameri- 17. John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Post, August 11, 1907. 1840–1910 (Urbana: can Medicine in Tran- Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of 26. “Chinese Poisons,” New York Times, University of Illinois sition, 229. American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore, Md.: May 20, 1883. Press, 1981), 223. 12. Historians of Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Mari 27. “Chinese Shot by Highbinder,” The 6. As quoted in medicine have dem- Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women Daily Call, January 27, 1904. Sarvis, “Gifted Healer onstrated the declin- and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford 28. “Potter Death Still a Mystery,” Los Ing Hay,” 67. ing use of mineral ca- University Press, 2003); Karen J. Leong, The Angeles Times, August 31, 1912. 7. Historians use thartics by American China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May 29. “Peach Poison Killed Potter,” New the terms regular, regular physicians by Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation York Times, September 1, 1912. western, allopathic, or the 1860s and ma- of American Orientalism (Berkeley: Univer- 30. Joan M. Jenson and Gloria Ricci orthodox medicine to jor strides in surgical sity of California Press, 2005). Lothrop, California Women: A History (San define a set of practic- techniques and steril- 18. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Mi- Francisco, Cal.: Boyd and Fraser, 1987), 58–64; es sanctioned by pro- ization by the 1890s, gration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle fessional associations but patient testimoni- America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of doctors and public als and articles in the 2001), 10–11. of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, health institutions, popular press show 19. Jonathan Goldstein, “Cantonese Ar- Oregon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University state licensing boards, that fears about “regu- tifacts, Chinoiserie, and the Early American Press, 2003), 147. and major medical Ing Hay was photographed as a lar” practices persisted Idealization of China,” in America Views 31. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of schools. Terms such well into the twen- China: American Images of China Then and Modern Feminism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale young man in Baker City, Oregon, as irregular or alterna- tieth century. John Now, ed. Jonathan Goldstein, et. al. (Bethle- University Press, 1987), 44. tive medicine define shortly after he emigrated from Harley Warner, The hem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press, 1991), 32. “Herb Quacks in Law Net,” Los Ange- other practices. These Toisan County in China’s Kwantung Therapeutic Perspec- 48–50; T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: les Times, June 4, 1907. terms are problematic Province. (Courtesy of Kam Wah tive: Medical Practice, Antimodernism and the Transformation of 33. Ibid. and ahistorical. At the Chung Museum.) Knowledge, and Iden- American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: The 34. “In a Frock Coat and High Hat,” Los end of the nineteenth tity in America, 1820– University of Chicago Press, 1981), 225–41. Angeles Times, March 10, 1908. and beginning of the 1885 (Cambridge, 20. James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics 35. “Herb ‘Doctors’ Taken,” Los Angeles twentieth centuries, American medicine Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 5–6; and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Times, December 10, 1913. was a mosaic of allopaths and homeopaths, Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: its Persecution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 36. “Doctor Chan Talks Fight,” Los Ange- emergent practices of osteopathy, natu- The Rise of America’s Hospital System (Balti- University Press, 1993), 153; Yoshihara, Em- les Times, July 31, 1907. ropathy, and chiropractic, distributors of more, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, bracing the East, 18–19. 37. William Tisdale, “Chinese Physicians proprietary drugs and devices, and faith 1987), 148–49. 21. For examples of letters from white in California,” Lippincott’s Magazine, vol. 63 healers. Nonetheless, the distinction between 13. For more on Indian herbal remedies patients to Ing Hay, see Ethel Carter to Ing (March 1899): 412. “regular” doctors and “irregular” doctors was see William G. Rothstein, “The Botanical Hay, May 19, 1906; P.A. Harbusto to Ing Hay, 38. Ibid., 414. apparent to their patients even if it was not Movements and Orthodox Medicine,” in November 9, 1907; Alvia W. Peters to Ing Hay 39. Ibid. well defined, and for the historian, such terms Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in Mod- and Lung On, December 29, 1930; Dorcas 40. Ibid., 16.

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism  41. For one example, see images on pages ally a wife or mother, sometimes a daughter. 280 and 281. There are also two examples About the same percentage of female letter from Los Angeles–area physicians repro- writers who were not patients wrote on duced in Bowen, “The Five Eras of Chinese behalf of family members (26.5 percent). As Medicine in California,” 182–83. with their male counterparts, these letters 42. Li Wing, The Science of Oriental tended to address the needs of female fam- Medicine, Diet, and Hygiene, 1902, California ily members (14 percent vs. 9 percent). This Digital Library, http://archive.org/details/ suggests that even though male and female scienceoforienta00foowrich (accessed June letter writers are about equally represented 28, 2012), 14–15. in the collection, women constituted the 43. Ibid., 8–9. majority of Ing Hay’s patients. Kam Wah 44. Unschuld, Medicine in China, 78. Chung Papers, reels 1 and 2. 45. Classified Ad 21 — No Title, Los 48. Oregon Historical Society Scrapbook Angeles Times, March 2, 1904; Display Ad 21, p. 59; Oregon Historical Society Scrap- 220 — No Title, Los Angeles Times, November book 48, p. 126; J. Southworth, A History 17, 1912; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los of Grant County (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Angeles Times (1881–1987). Company, 1983), 55, 87–88; Kam Wah Chung 46. Reprinted in Chia-lin Chen, “The Papers, reels 1 and 2; United States Federal The Kam Wah Chung & Co. building in Canyon City, Oregon in the 1990s. Golden Flower of Prosperity,” October 1, Census [database online], Provo, Utah: An- (Courtesy of Kam Wah Chung Museum.) 1971, Portland State University, prepared for cestry.com Operations, Inc., 2004 (accessed Oregon Historical Society, Kam Wah Chung February 28, 2013). Papers. 49. The “Cult of True Womanhood” is 47. Although Ing Hay was essentially the a nineteenth-century phrase first revived family doctor in many instances, prescrib- in historical scholarship by Barbara Welter, ing and sending medicines for the different “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” 50. Gynecology as a distinct field of study dale’s observation. Beth Howlett, Oregon ailments of husband, wives, children, and American Quarterly, 18:2 (Summer 1966): within Chinese medicine first developed in College of Oriental Medicine, interview with grandparents in the same family, an analysis 152. See also Elizabeth Jameson, “Women as the Song Dynasty (960–1279). See Charlotte author, September 8, 2011. of patient letters suggests that he treated Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Woman- Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s 65. Wing, The Science of Oriental Medi- more women than men. I chose a sample hood in the American West,” in The Women’s Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: Univer- cine, 154. of 117 letters based on the following three West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jame- sity of California Press, 1999). 66. Wo, Things Chinese, 23. criteria: The sample roughly approximated son (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 51. Wing, The Science of Oriental Medi- 67. Whorton, Nature Cures, 155. Boise the sex distribution of the entire collection 1984). The doctors’ emphasis on motherhood cine, 167. doctor C.K. Ah Fong successfully sued to of 249 letters (55 percent male and 45 percent was undeniably out of touch with the “New 52. Ibid., 150. have his license reinstated after the Idaho female); I could easily identify both the name Woman” of the 1920s. In the wake of the 53. Ibid. State Board of Medical Examiners stripped it and sex of the letter writer and eliminate Nineteenth Amendment, a new icon of white 54. Ibid. from him in 1899. Smith, “Choosing Chinese double counting; letters primarily concerned femininity had burst onto the scene. Sexually 55. C. Gee Wo, Things Chinese, Fifth Medicine,” 27–28. medical issues and had clear and substantive liberated, empowered by the right to vote, Edition, 1924, 49, Oregon Historical Society. 68. Mei Zhan, Other-worldly: Making information about the patients and their and often depicted in a “flapper” costume, 56. Wing, The Science of Oriental Medi- Chinese Medicine Through Transnational treatment. From the data, we can observe the “New Woman” seemed omnipresent in cine, 143. Frames (Durham, N.C.: Duke University that male and female patients wrote to Kam popular media. It is difficult to say whether 57. Ibid., 70. Press, 2009), 14. Wah Chung in roughly equal numbers. In Chinese doctors’ emphasis on “true woman- 58. Wo, Things Chinese, 28. 69. “National College of Natural both groups, roughly two thirds of the letter hood” attracted or repeled the “New Woman” 59. Ibid., 47–48. Medicine,”http://ocom.edu/; http://www. writers were themselves patients. The letters due to the absence of first-person accounts. 60. Unschuld, Medicine in China, 223. ncnm.edu/academic-programs/school- from non-patients are arguably more sugges- The “New Woman” of the 1920s did not 61. Wing, The Science of Oriental Medi- of-classical-chinese-medicine/about-the- tive about the ratio of male to female patients wholly replace Victorian “true womanhood,” cine, 15. medicine.php (accessed June 13, 2013). under Ing Hay’s care. Thirty percent of male with its emphasis on sexual purity and pious 62. Wo, Things Chinese, 30. 70. Terri A. Winnick, “From Quackery to letter writers were not patients but were domesticity. See Ellen Carol DuBois and 63. Ibid., 28–30, 38–40. ‘Complementary’ Medicine: The American writing on behalf of their family members. Lynn Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes: An 64. Tisdale, “Chinese Physicians in Cali- Medical Profession Confronts Alternative Among these writers, two thirds of them were American History with Documents (Boston: fornia,” 415. A survey of Kam Wah Chung’s Therapies,” Social Problems, 52:1 (February writing for female family members only, usu- Bedford/St. Martins, 2005), 483. materia medica seems to corroborate Tis- 2005): 53–54.

 OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 Venit Shelton, Chinese Medicine and American Orientalism 