Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, "Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945" (U California Press, 2018)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Apr 21, 2022 · 1h 10m

When China’s War of Resistance against Japan began in July 1937, it sparked an immediate health crisis throughout China. In the end, China not only survived the war but emerged from the trauma with a more cohesive population.

Nicole Elizabeth Barnes’s book, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945 (University of California Press, 2018), argues that women who worked as military and civilian nurses, doctors, and midwives during this turbulent period built the national community, one relationship at a time. In a country with a majority illiterate…