Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao's Campaign to Deworm China / Edition 1

by Miriam Gross

Overview

Farewell to the God of Plague reassesses the celebrated Maoist health care model through the lens of Mao’s famous campaign against snail fever. Using newly available archives, Miriam Gross documents how economic, political, and cultural realities led to grassroots resistance. Nonetheless, the campaign triumphed, but not because of its touted mass-prevention campaign. Instead, success came from its unacknowledged treatment arm, carried out jointly by banished urban doctors and rural educated youth. More broadly, the author reconsiders the relationship between science and political control during the ostensibly antiscientific Maoist era, discovering the important role of “grassroots science” in regime legitimation and Party control in rural areas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520288836
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/19/2016
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Miriam Gross is Assistant Professor jointly in the history department and in the department of international and area studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman.

 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Part I From The Eyes at the Top: Overview of the Campaign

1 Chairman Mao Weighs In: The High Politics of the Campaign 15

Part II The Campaign Nobody Wanted: Structural and Economic Underpinnings to Rural Resistance

2 Dodging Leadership in an Era of Decentralization: Structural Problems of the 1950s 43

3 Denying Economic Responsibility While Brandishing an Empty Purse 61

Part III The three arms op the campaign: Education, Prevention, and treatment

4 Building the New Scientific Socialist Society: Educating the Masses 87

5 Preventing the Unpreventable 115

6 The Challenges of Treatment 145

Part IV Government Benevolence? The Nonhealth Benefits of Health Campaigns

7 Doing the Unthinkable: Scientifically Legitimating Party Intrusion in the 1950s 181

8 Scientific Consolidation in the Late 1960s and 1970s 203

Conclusion 237

Notes 253

Bibliography 305

Index 345

Editorial Reviews

"[Gross] provides a balanced and clear-eyed analysis of an important milestone in global health and of the early days of the PRC."

Pacific Affairs

"[A] remarkable work."

Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

"Gross has written an important work... illuminating."

Health Tomorrow: Interdisciplinarity and Internationality