Between Party, People, and Profession: The Many Faces of the ‘Doctor’ during the Cultural Revolution

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Chairman Mao fundamentally reformed medicine so that rural people received medical care. His new medical model has been variously characterised as: revolutionary Maoist medicine, a revitalised form of Chinese medicine; and the final conquest by Western medicine. This paper finds that instead of Mao’s vision of a new ‘revolutionary medicine’, there was a new medical synthesis that drew from the Maoist ideal and Western and Chinese traditions, but fundamentally differed from all of them. Maoist medicine’s ultimate aim was doctors as peasant carers. However, rural people and local governments valued treatment expertise, causing divergence from this ideal. As a result, Western and elite Chinese medical doctors sent to the countryside for rehabilitation were preferable to barefoot doctors and received rural support. Initially Western-trained physicians belittled elite Chinese doctors, and both looked down on barefoot doctors and indigenous herbalists and acupuncturists. However, the levelling effect of terrible rural conditions made these diverse conceptions of the doctor closer during the Cultural Revolution. Thus, urban doctors and rural medical practitioners developed a symbiotic relationship: barefoot doctors provided political protection and local knowledge for urban doctors; urban doctors’ provided expertise and a medical apprenticeship for barefoot doctors; and both counted on the local medical knowledge of indigenous healers. This fragile conceptual nexus had fallen apart by the end of the Maoist era (1976), but the evidence of new medical syntheses shows the diverse range of alliances that become possible under the rubric of ‘revolutionary medicine’.