Commodifying and Consuming Endocrine Drugs in Republican China (1920s–1940s)

Abstract

Since the introduction of hormone pharmaceuticals into China during the early twentieth century, these substances became objects of fascination for a growing urban elite class. Drawing from newspapers, medical journals, and advertisements, this article examines the unique trajectories of hormone medicine in China. In conversation with previous scholarship on the dynamics of advertising and consuming hormones in China, this article examines specifically the discourses around the production and science of hormones. The circulation of hormones was informed by ideas of traditional Chinese medical cosmologies and enrolled in a nationalist movement encouraging the consumption of hormones produced by emerging Chinese medical entrepreneurs. This article provides a case study in a postcolonial context that problematizes historiographies depicting a linear transition of global hormone science from backwards to scientific, from traditional to modern.