Medical Bilingualism: Reframing the Overlap between Medical Systems in Recent Medical History and Anthropology

Abstract This paper explores increased use of the concept of “medical bilingualism” since 2015 as scholars, especially of East Asian medical history and anthropology, have applied it to engagements between two medical systems. It reveals an ongoing evolution in the way that scholars understand what a medical system is and how medical systems are differentiated and compared with one another. The image of culturally homogeneous systems of meaning and practice that dominated mid-twentieth-century scholarship on medical systems (especially using the category of ethnomedicines) has been giving way to a more culturally heterogeneous and cosmopolitan picture of how medical practitioners evolve, integrate, and differentiate medical concepts and practices in the context of contemporary societies and the new forms of life they engender. This reformulated concept of medical bilingualism emphasizes the ways in which medical systems overlap yet remain distinct. First, the paper summarizes results of an experiment with AI searches on medical bilingualism, then narrates its historiography both pre-COVID-19 and during COVID-19, and finally concludes with some reflections on language ideology, multilingualism, and medical pluralism.