Childbirth and Medicine in Modern Chinese Literature

By focusing on three stories from the 1930s and early 1940s, Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death (1935), Ding Ling’s “In the Hospital” (1941) and “Sacrifice” (1931), this paper argues that although the process of women’s pregnancies was one of suffering, learning modern obstetric knowledge could help them relieve their pain and allowed them to build their self-awareness. In particular, the development of the mother-daughter relationship plays a crucial role in this process. By comparing these works, this paper attempts to illustrate how women’s understanding of medicine underwent dramatic and fundamental transitions throughout twentieth-century China.