<p>Medical care in nineteenth-century China was spectacularly pluralistic: herbalists, shamans, bone-setters, midwives, priests, and a few medical missionaries from the West all competed for patients. This book examines the dichotomy between &quot;Western&quot; and &quot;Chinese&quot; medicine, showing how it has been greatly exaggerated. As missionaries went to lengths to make their medicine more acceptable to Chinese patients, modernizers of Chinese medicine worked to become more &quot;scientific&quot; by eradicating superstition and creating modern institutions. Andrews challenges the supposed superiority of Western medicine in China while showing how &quot;traditional&quot; Chinese medicine was deliberately created in the image of a modern scientific practice.</p>