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Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
by Lisa See
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Fifteenth-century Ming China. Tan Yunxian is born into an elite family but receives an unusual medical education from her grandmother, one of the few women permitted to treat female patients. Her friendship with Meiling, a midwife’s daughter, gives her access to knowledge of childbirth and women’s illnesses that male physicians cannot obtain under the rules of bodily separation.
After marriage, Yunxian enters a wealthy household where her mother-in-law forbids contact with Meiling and expects her to remain within the duties of wifehood and motherhood. Yunxian continues to diagnose and treat women through domestic networks, gradually establishing authority without public office. The novel draws on the historical physician’s surviving case records to reconstruct how women transmitted medical knowledge within Ming society.
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