Medicine and Healthcare

This chapter first integrates the growing literature on the medical and social welfare history of Hong Kong. It offers a comprehensive account of colonial medical policies from the 1950s to the 1970s, when numerous social reforms took place to legitimize colonial governance and therefore emphasized previously overlooked medical problems, such as rehabilitation of the mentally and physically disabled. It then engages with a recent turn in the history of medicine by examining the globalization of traditional Chinese medicine during the Cold War. The colonial ambivalent attitude towards traditional Chinese medicine led to an unintended consequence: turning Hong Kong into an “in-between place” for circulating Chinese medical materials, personnel and technology to Southeast Asia and North America.