Historical Studies (Chinese Edition)

No.5, 2014

Evolution of the Modern Medicine Community: From the China Medical Missionary Association (CMMA) to Chinese Medical Association (CMA)

(Abstract)

Tao Feiya, Wang Hao

While they were promoting missionary work China with the help of medical science, Western missionaries in modern times founded the earliest medical science community in China, the China Medical Missionary Association (CMMA), whose system and ideas provided experience and example for later local medical organizations. However, due to CMMA’s limitations in cooperation with the Chinese society, including its strict requirements, religious nature and status as a foreign organization, some Chinese elites of Western medicine established the Chinese Medical Association (CMA). The latter boosted the development of modern Chinese medical science through its cooperation and competition with the CMMA, yet problems like insufficiency of resources and academic authority still existed. Although the CMMA consisted mainly of Westerners had expressed their willingness to hand over their medical rights and duties to its growing Chinese counterpart, it lacked the motivation to take actions. Pressed by the upsurge of nationalism evoked by the anti-Christian movement and national revolution, after negotiations and promises, the two organizations merged into the new CMA, which was dominated by Chinese. This cinicization-oriented identity transformation and resource integration made the new CMA not only inherit the professionalism and international feature of its two predecessors, but also promote its successful cooperation with the medical administrative departments in the Republican era, so that it became one of the good examples of making foreign things serve China in the Chinese medical system.