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Female Health and Medicine (Fu Ke)
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, like in many other cultures, the health and medicine of female bodies was less understood than that of male bodies. Women's bodies were often secondary to male bodies, since women were thought of as the weaker, sicklier sex. Yin and Yang were critical to the understanding of women's bodies, yet they were only understood in conjunction with male bodies. Women's diseases were harder to treat and cure in the eyes of many cultures, but especially in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Finally, social and cultural beliefs were often barriers to understanding the female body.

In order to understand the way that the Traditional Chinese Medicine looked at female bodies, it is critical to understand the relationship of yin and yang to the practice of medicine. According to Charlotte Furth and her book, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, Yin and Yang showed the embodiment of nature within human bodies, and with it the natural phenomena that we understand as gendered differences. Yin and yang ruled the body, the body being a microcosm of the universe and the earth. In addition, gender in the body was understood as homologous, the two genders operating in synchronization.

Operating within Yin and Yang, bodily functions could be categorized through systems. In many drawings and diagrams, the twelve channels and their visceral systems were organized by yin and yang, and that organization was identical in female and male bodies. This points to the understanding in traditional Chinese medicine that female and male bodies were no different on the plane of yin and yang. Their gendered differences were not acknowledged in diagrams of the human body. Medical journals were filled with illustrations of male bodies or androgynous bodies, those that did not display gendered characteristics.

Fu Ke is the Chinese word for women's medicine. Like other cultures, fertility and menstruation dominate the science of female health in Chinese medicine. However, it was not physical, anatomical structures that differentiated women from men, but physiological and pathological processes of the body. This is an important distinction, because it refers back to the traditional Chinese understanding of Yin and Yang and gender differences. Bodies looked the same, and were governed by the same forces, but their processes looked different in men and women.

For example, understanding the womb and its fundamental difference from male bodies was irrelevant. Traditional Chinese medicine did not recognize the womb as the place of reproduction. For the Chinese, the abdominal cavity presented pathologies that were similar in both men and women, which included tumors, growths, hernias, and swellings of the genitals. The "master system" as Charlotte Furth identifies, is the Kidney visceral system, which governed reproductive functions in Traditional Chinese medicine. Therefore, it was not the anatomical structures in women that allowed for pregnancy, but the difference in female processes that allowed for the affliction of pregnancy to occur.

Social and cultural beliefs were often barriers to learning more about female health, with women themselves often being the most formidable barrier. Women were often uncomfortable talking about their illnesses, especially in front of the male chaperones that attended medical examinations. Women would choose to omit certain symptoms as a means of upholding their chastity and honor. One such examples is the case in which a teenage girl was unable to be diagnosed because she failed to mention her symptom of vaginal discharge. Silence was their way of maintaining control in these situations, but it often came at the expense of their health and the advancement of female health and medicine. This silence and control was most obviously seen when the health problem was related to the core of Ming fuke, or the sexual body. It was often in these diagnostic settings that women would choose silence. In addition, there would be conflict between patient and doctor on the probability of her diagnosis. For example, a woman who thought herself to be past the point of child-bearing age, might not believe a doctor who diagnoses her as pregnant. This only resulted in more conflict.

In conclusion, female health and medicine was a topic that was not well understood by Traditional Chinese medicine. Although yin and yang were central to understanding female bodies, it was often only through the lens of male bodies. Women were seen as variations of male bodies, with similar structures only with different processes. This was also compounded by the autonomy of women who chose to stay silent during diagnostics, and thus complicate the issue of female health and medicine.

Infertility
Infertility was also not very well understood in traditional Chinese medicine, however it posed serious social and cultural repercussions.

One of the most cited scholar that mentions female health is 7th-century scholar Sun Simiao. He is often quoted to the likes of "those who have prescriptions for women's distinctiveness take their differences of pregnancy, childbirth and [internal] bursting injuries as their basis." Even in contemporary fu ke does Sun's observations about female reproductive functions, it stills remains an important function of women's health. The propensity to place more emphasis on reproductive functions, rather than the entire health of the woman, seems to suggest that the main function of fu ke is to produce children.

Once again, the Kidney visceral system governs the "source Qi," which governs the reproductive systems in both sexes. This source Qi was thought to "be slowly depleted through sexual activity, menstruation and childbirth." It was also understood that the depletion of source Qi could result from the movement of an external pathology that moved through the outer visceral systems before causing more permanent damage to the home of source Qi, the Kidney system. In addition, the view that only very serious ailments ended in the damage of this system means that those who had trouble with their reproductive systems or fertility were seriously ill.

According to traditional Chinese medical texts, infertility can be summarized into different syndrome types. These were spleen and kidney depletion (yang depletion), liver and kidney depletion (yin depletion), blood depletion, phlegm damp, liver oppression, and damp heat. This is important because, while most other issues were complex in Chinese medical physiology, women's fertility issues were simple. Most syndrome types revolved around menstruation, or lack thereof. The patient was entrusted with recording not only the frequency, but also the "volume, color, consistency, and odor of menstrual flow." This placed responsibility of symptom recording on the patient, and was compounded by the earlier discussed issue of female chastity and honor. This meant that diagnosing female infertility was difficult, because the only symptoms that were recorded and monitored by the physician was the pulse and color of the tongue.

In conclusion, the issue of infertility shows how social and cultural barriers affected the practice of traditional Chinese medicine.