Discovering ‘The Secrets of Long and Healthy Life’: John Dudgeon on Chinese Hygiene.

John Dudgeon, a Scottish physician practising medicine in China in the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote extensively on the diet, dress, housing and social customs of the Chinese and their implications for health. While Dudgeon's contemporaries were highly critical of Chinese sanitary conditions and personal hygiene, he argued that China's lifestyle and urban conditions were superior to those in Europe. Dudgeon's observations in China, combined with his views on deteriorating economic conditions and heightened social tensions in Scotland, resulted in his critical reflections on British metropolitan culture and lifestyle. His admiration of Chinese hygiene and his conception of the diseases of civilisation were closely connected to his nostalgic vision of a paternalistic society. It is the contention of this paper that Dudgeon's eccentric medical ideas manifested the interplay between metropolitan medical theories and the overseas experiences of a British physician in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]