Nicole Elizabeth Barnes, Intimate Communities, Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937–1945

Nicole Barnes explores the contribution of wartime nurses to the shaping of a national community. However, did people need nurses to relate to one another as a national community? Barnes suggests nurses performed important emotional labour, binding local people in need of health care, the displaced, and wounded soldiers in what she calls intimate communities. As a framework Barnes uses a tweaked version of Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities by focussing not on intellectuals but on the illiterate masses, in an attempt to write a history from below modelled on subaltern studies. Even though through stories we read about the experience of everyday people in wartime China, Barnes cannot totally circumvent what she calls intellectual sources, as she makes use of doctors’, female writers’ and political actors’ writings as important sources. The first chapter depicts a feminist critique of the failure of male health administrators or of the patriarchal state to use disciplinary power in their attempt to police Chongqing, China’s wartime capital. Here Barnes refers to the sanitary campaigns of the famous fascist movement- The New Life Movement - and the authorities’ attempt to force people to comply with medical rules. Barnes shows that one of the failures of male health administrators in dealing efficiently with epidemics such as cholera was in vaccinating four times more men than women. Barnes praises instead the emotional labour of nurses and their significance for the nation following previous incursions into the history of emotions by Haiyan Lee’s work on love and Eugenia Lean’s notion of public passions and blending a focus on the history of emotions with history of medicine approach.1 Important figures that blended emotion and nationalism that Barnes looks at are Song Meiling, who advocated for orphans and wartime health services, and Zhou Meiyu who not only helped with the professionalisation of nurses but also used women’s emotional labour to benefit the nationalist state. Barnes does not shy away from using literary realism as salient source for medical history, such as Ba Jin’s story ‘Ward Four’ or female writer Xie Bingying’s wartime writings, as well as her work in organising a women’s medical corps during the war.

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