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by Linda L. Barnes, 458 pp, with illus, $49.95, ISBN 0-674-01872-9, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 2005.

JAMA. 2006;296:706.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Conceptions of illness and healing practices provide deep insights into cultures and communities, and the fascination of Westerners with China and the Chinese partly relates to the unfamiliar, exotic, and incomprehensible ways of medicine encountered in China by Western observers starting in about the 13th century. Linda L. Barnes, a medical anthropologist at Boston University School of Medicine, addresses the changing perceptions of the Chinese and their healing practices as viewed in the West by physicians, missionaries, adventurers, and government officials.

Barnes notes that Western observers in effect had to "imagine" a Chinese culture in terms that made sense to the Western mind. Thus, she unpacks the implications of Western categories applied to the Chinese and their healing practices: racial categories, regional categories, and medical categories. In doing so, she aims to present a history of cross-cultural interactions. She notes that this book is not a history of Chinese medicine.

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William C. Summers, MD, PhD, Reviewer
Yale University School of Medicine
New Haven, Conn
william.summers@yale.edu