The Politics of Medical Education at the Lyon Sino-French Institute

This paper considers an unusual programme of medical education organized through the Lyon Sino-French Institute, which sponsored the postgraduate studies of over four hundred Chinese youths in France between 1921 and 1951. Forty of these students studied at the Faculty of Medicine in Lyon and affiliated organizations. An examination of the students’ correspondence, publications, and medical theses provides an opportunity to learn what kinds of knowledge they valued, and why, in a context of epistemological uncertainty. I suggest that despite claims of political disinterest as a means of professionalization, students at Lyon became socially and politically engaged advocates for the integration of Chinese and Western medical traditions. Although the Institute’s founders cited idealistic aims in fostering intellectual life, its members chose to study medicine and selected medical specialties on grounds of social and political utility. As students combined clinical experience with laboratory research and textbook learning, they sought to apply knowledge acquired in France to Chinese environments. Subsequent efforts to implement pharmaceutical and biochemical methods in the analysis of Chinese herbal medicines had political ramifications, involving the students in debates over the relationships between Chinese and Western medicine — and, by extension, the relationships between Chinese intellectual tradition and global modernity.