Jieluan Huang
PhD title: Medical Diaspora and the Making of Modern Medicine: Chinese Medicine in Post-War London
My project explores the history of Chinese medicine in Britain from the mid-twentieth century to the present. It follows practitioners, patients, and families as they built medical lives across Britain and China, asking what those lives reveal about how medical knowledge develops, is tested, and is negotiated through migration.
Drawing on oral history interviews alongside archival research, the thesis examines how migration, commercial practice, state regulation, and everyday social life reshaped ideas about the body, illness, and healing. Chinese medicine carries a distinctive history of modern state-making. Although it occupied a rather marginal position in British healthcare, looking through this lens raises questions that histories of mainstream medicine rarely need to ask: how medical knowledge becomes trusted, how some forms of healing gain authority while others do not, and how those boundaries are drawn and redrawn over time.
Supervisors: Dr Caitjan Gainty, Dr. Konstatinos Tsimonis
Biography
I began my undergraduate studies in History at the University of Warwick and completed my postgraduate training at University College London, where I was introduced to medical humanities and social anthropology. Those encounters shaped the interdisciplinary perspective that continues to inform my research.
I am currently a PhD candidate in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at King's College London, affiliated with CHoSTM and the Lau China Institute. My research mainly explores how people come to understand their bodies, illness, and healing, and the historical and social conditions that shape those understandings. Questions of trust, identity, and gender also run throughout my work.
Conference papers
"Between Systems: A Case Study of Diasporic Medicine in the UK." Past Continuous: Historical Narratives from Modernity to the Contemporary, 15th Spring History Symposium, University of Hong Kong, May 2026.
"Actor, Agency, and Biopower: A Medical History Perspective in Chinese Society," Humanities, Technology, and Governance in Chinese Modernization Forum, hosted by Beihang University in Beijing, December 2023.
"Women in Rural-Urban Migration: An Oral History Approach," ChiNESS (China in Social Sciences) Conference, University of Sheffield, June 2023.
Publications
Book chapters
(forthcoming) "A Family's Medical Worlds: Chinese Medicine in Twenty-First-Century London." In Routledge Handbook of the History of Modern Medicine, Part IV: Pluralising Modern Medicine's Narratives. Routledge, 2027.