This paper examines the diverse ways in which Chinese medical experts historically gendered breast disease as a female ailment. By comparing representations of the female breast from the "Imperially-Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning (Yuzuan yizong jinjian, 1742)" to those from earlier and contemporary texts, this paper analyzes how breast disease was alternately categorized as an ailment of childbearing and as a disease rooted in pathological female emotion. Medical awareness of breast disease in men did somewhat challenge these connections between womanhood and disease. Nevertheless, medical illustrations of women helped to reinforce the idea that breast disease was a characteristically female problem.

This article argues that early Chinese physicians had already related female ailments to their sexual frustration. Moreover, many physicians paid more attention to non-reproductive women – nuns, widows, and unmarried women – as if they were more prone to suffer from unfulfilled desires and sexual frustration and, as a result, produce the sexual dreams and monstrous births that were described in the medical literature of medieval China as physical ailments. The earlier body-oriented etiology of these female illnesses gradually shifted to emotion-oriented perspectives in late imperial China. In particular, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century doctors began to categorize women's sexual frustration as "yu disorders" or "love madness." In this article I will show not only the changing medical views of female sexual madness throughout the ages, but how these views were shaped by the societies in which both the doctors and patients were situated.

Tobacco entered Manchuria on the same wave of early modern globalization that brought it from the Americas to other parts of Eurasia in the early seventeenth century. Introduced into northeast Asia sometime after 1600, it began to circulate widely in Manchuria precisely at a time when Hong Taiji (1592-1643) was building the early Qing state. This essay examines Hong Taiji's efforts to criminalize tobacco in the 1630s and 1640s, arguing that these prohibitions were largely directed at gaining state control over a valuable economic resource. However, within the commercialized milieu of seventeenth-century Liaodong, a region with ties to broader transregional circuits of trade, tobacco's lucrative profits and its pleasurable allure simply overpowered state efforts to monopolize it. As in most other early seventeenth-century Eurasian societies, the Qing tobacco bans quickly gave way to legalization and taxation.

In late imperial China, a number of purported methods of abortion were known; but who actually attempted abortion and under what circumstances? Some historians have suggested that abortion was used for routine birth control, which presupposes that known methods were safe, reliable, and readily available. This paper challenges the qualitative evidence on which those historians have relied, and presents new evidence from Qing legal sources and modern medical reports to argue that traditional methods of abortion (the most common being abortifacient drugs) were dangerous, unreliable, and often cost a great deal of money. Therefore, abortion in practice was an emergency intervention in a crisis: either a medical crisis, in which pregnancy threatened a woman's health, or a social crisis, in which pregnancy threatened to expose a woman's extramarital sexual relations. Moreover, abortion was not necessarily available even to women who wanted one.