Chinese Studies, School of Humanities & Languages, UNSW Sydney
Date: Thursday 28 May 2020
Time: 10:00-11:30pm AEST
Zoom Link: https://unsw.zoom.us/j/93062688107
No registration required.
What underpins East Asian countries’ success against the COVID-19 pandemic? This presentation argues that while the experiences in fighting the SARS virus in 2003 was critical in shaping their anti-pandemic responses towards COVID-19, using a historical approach toward understanding how communities like Taiwan fought against SARS can reveal surprising continuities and changes over time. Managing hidden political conflicts, dealing with the lack of personal protective equipment, and manoeuvring international health diplomacy were just as harrowing as fighting the actual virus in 2003. Understanding the contemporary history of medicine is urgent, critical, and relevant, even if sources and frameworks are not so readily available to historians.
Discussant: Dr Wah Guan Lim, UNSW
About the speaker
Wayne Soon (PhD Princeton) is a historian of modern China and East Asia at Vassar College, New York, with a particular interest in how international ideas and practices of medicine, institution-building, and diaspora have shaped the region’s interaction with its people and the world in the twentieth century. He has a monograph Global Medicine in China: a Diasporic History at press with Stanford that examines the history of medicine in China through the lens of the Overseas Chinese who brought back new biomedical theories, practices and institutions in the first half of the 20th century. In highlighting the centrality of the diaspora in establishing a network of military medical institutions in China during the Second World War, he argues that the resultant wartime development of a medical culture of adaptability, portability, universality and mobility left behind important legacies in health care and medical education in post-war China and Taiwan. Dr Soon’s published and forthcoming articles can be found in Twentieth-Century China, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Asian Studies Review, Asian Medicine, Social History of Medicine, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.
Contact:
Prof Jon von Kowallis
Email: j.vonkowallis@unsw.edu.au
Tel. +61-2-9385-1020
Chinese Studies
School of Humanities and Languages
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
UNSW Sydney