Marta Hanson is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, USA. Her research interests are in the history of medicine, disease, and public health in China and the cultural history of Chinese arts of memory.

• Part 1: Foundation and Inheritances 1. Medical History in Three Themes 2. A Deep History of the Chinese Geographic Imagination: The Five Regions, Northwest-Southeast, and the Southern Shift Part 2: New Ming Medical Boundaries 3: The Geographic Imagination in Ming Medicine: Northern Purgatives, Southern Restoratives, and Conceptions of North and South 4. Ming Medical Frontiers: Diseases of the Far South, New Conceptions of Contagion 5. Ming Medical Scepticism: Epidemiological Crisis, Cosmological Criticism Part 3: Early-Modern and Modern Medical Transformations 6. Matters of Place: Epistemological Divergence, Genealogical Division 7. Emergence of Traditions: The Nineteenth-Century Genealogy and Geography of Warm Diseases Conclusion New and Old Nosologies in Modern China: From the Geographic Imagination to Distribution of Diseases in China (and back again)

"Rich, detailed, and hugely impressive in scope, Marta Hanson’s history of the “warm diseases” or the wenbing disease classification, from the earliest references in the canonical medical literature through to the present day, is a welcome addition to the Needham Research Institute Series of texts on East Asian medical history... the picture she paints is not only a fantastically thorough portrait of the Chinese wenbing disease concept that will be of interest to historians of East Asian medical history, but also a richly textured landscape that reveals much about the previously unexplored intersections between geography and disease and will have a broader appeal to anyone interested in the dynamic interplay between medicine and society." - Joanna Grant; Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2013.