NIH Grant To Fund Study on Public Health in China
In the first half of the 20th century, a picture was worth a
thousand words in conveying scientific health knowledge to a largely
illiterate population in China.
Analyzing their effectiveness is part of a major research project by
Alma College Professor Liping Bu, who has been awarded a $130,000 grant
from the National Institutes of Health for a two-year study that
examines the history of public health education and campaigns in 20th
century China.
To her knowledge, no other comprehensive study of Chinese public health campaigns exists, says Bu.
This
poster from the 1960s explains how malaria is spread by mosquitos, and
that the eradication of mosquitos is an important means of preventing
malaria. Posters with vivid images and succinct text were effective
educational tools.
“My purpose is to write a book-length manuscript about public
health and the modernization of China,” says the China-born and
educated Bu, who has been a member of the Alma College history faculty
since 1999. “I’ve been working on this project since 2001 when I
started doing archival research.”
Bu’s research has taken her to archival collections in China as well as
the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., the Rockefeller
Archive Center in New York, and Cambridge University in England.
Her NIH-funded project, titled “Public Health Education and Campaigns
in China, 1910-1990,” will extend her research to study how science,
culture and modernization intersected in the area of public health.
“Public health campaigns were an essential element in creating a
modern, strong Chinese nation,” says Bu. “I will examine how the
Chinese elite, government regimes and private institutions tried to
educate the public about health issues and the tension that existed
between traditional Chinese medicine and modern Western medicine in
public health programs.”
Liping Bu
Her
study will draw on archival documents, oral histories and visual
materials to analyze the different public health concerns that were
closely tied to China’s political and economic developments at
different times.
It also will examine the dominance of scientific knowledge of medicine
in public health education, the challenge of transmitting scientific
knowledge of health and diseases to a large population with a high
illiteracy rate, and how health campaigns contributed to the reduction
and elimination of epidemic diseases such as smallpox, cholera and
malaria.
Her study on how public health campaigns influence change in
health-related behavior offers useful lessons for many nations today,
including China, says Bu.
“Literacy is essential for health education to be effective, and
government’s role is crucial for national health care reforms to be
successful,” says Bu. “This study has useful relevance to current
public health concerns in different nations.”
Bu teaches American foreign relations and modern Chinese and Japanese
history. Her academic articles on international cultural relations,
modernization and nation building, and state and society have appeared
in numerous research journals. Every two years, she leads a class of
Alma College students to China as part of a Spring Term course titled
“China: Past and Present.”
Posted: Tue, March 24th, 2009 at 2:54PM
