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Christianity and Sugar
The rise of global exploration by the Spanish and Portuguese aided the growth and expansion of the sugar trade. Through their cultivation of sugar, a new process emerged that made processing sugarcane cheaper and enabled them to receive a yield of higher quality. This invention was the vertical roller mill which consisted of two or more rollers that were geared to move in different directions that would crush the sugarcane. After the sugarcane was crushed, it would then have to be processed through multiple boilers and eventually clay.

Catholic missionaries played a major role in the diffusion of the new technology that was the vertical roller mill. Missionaries traveled around the world hoping to study and adapt different sugar-making methods from places such as China and India around the sixteenth century. By late seventeenth century, as plantations within the Americas continued to grow, Brazil became the dominant sugar producer.

Due to the increase of sugar cultivation, obtaining sugar became easier and more affordable. Thus, Europeans could now enjoy Islamic-inspired confectionary goods that were previously costly to produce. Surprisingly, the Jesuits were leading producers of chocolate, obtaining it from the Amazon jungle and Guatemala and shipping it across the world to Southeast Asia, Spain and Italy.

The Jesuits introduced Mesoamerican techniques to Europe for processing and preparing chocolate which in turn reintroduced simple grindstones into Europe. Fermented cocoa beans had to ground on heated grindstones to prevent producing oily chocolate, a process that was foreign to many Europeans. As a beverage, chocolate remained largely within the Catholic world as it was not considered a food to the church and thus could be enjoyed during fasting.

France[edit]
France is good example of a complex society due to the history being well known and documented. Thus, historians can trace just how the rise of medieval France occurred. The evolution of ancient Gaul into early modern France provides an example to how complex societies have come into being. There existed a degree of continuity in the hierarchical organization of France from the Iron Age to the 18th century. When the Romans attempted to organize Gaul, they altered the tribal structures which were not simple rather complex chiefdoms. [21]

The integration of a large territory in France happened repeatedly between the Iron Age and the early modern age. It did not happen all at once however, occurring in small steps. The integration proceeded in a hierarchical manner.

Disintegration also occurred in a multi-step process. France was disintegrated into units which were fragmented into counties and in some regions, even further into castellanies. By the end of the ninth century, at least twenty-nine independent politics were in France. Nearly a century later, the number had grown to at least fifty-five.[22]

The history of France traces the evolution of a hierarchical complexity as a complex large-scale societies came about through warfare. Early modern France was a five-level hierarchy where the largest level of organization was divided in provinces, gouvernements, which was then in turn subdivided into smaller units called bailliages.[22] This theory makes sense as a society can engage in warfare to grow and increase in size, resources and diversity.

Gender in Traditional Medicine
In traditional clinical encounters, women and men were treated differently as one could imagine given the time period. Chinese doctor Cheng Maoxian, born in 1581, lived and pracitced medicine in Yangzhou in the 1610s and 1620s. He took diligent care to write case studies of his interactions with his patients and their ailments as well as his prescribed medicines. Doctors such as Maoxian treated men as well as women, however it seems that women were met with more stereotypes imposed by their doctors then men. For example, Cheng told each case study witin social conditions.

In these encounters, between sick women and their male doctors,women were often shy about their issues and made the doctor's work more difficult because they did not know all the symptoms the patient was expereinces. Even if they did confess all their symptoms, doctors, such as Cheng, would condsider the majority of the illness to be linked to some problem concerning the woman's reproductive system or cycle. One of the stories Cheng discussed in his case studies was that of Fan Jisuo's teenage daughter, who could not be diagnosed because she was unwilling to speak on her symptoms. In this partiuclar case, hers involved discharge from her intimate areas. Cheng insisted on asking more about her illness and here, her modesty, her want to protect the information that regarded an intimate part of her body became a frustrating trend that doctors struggled with.

When a woman fell ill, an appropriate adult man was to call the doctor and remain present during the examination, for the woman could not be left alone with the doctor. However, this was not always the case. In particular cases, when a woman dealt with complications with their pregnacy or at birht, older women became involved and assumed the role of the formal authority. Men in these situations would not have much power to interfere.

However, when a doctor's visit was absoluetly neccessary, there existed tension as a breaking of norms may have been needed. In order to properly examine the patient, the doctor's were faced with the task of going beyond the norm of female modesty. As cheng describes, there were four standard methods of diagnosis--looking, asking, listening and smelling and touching (for pulse-taking). In order to maintain some form of modesty, women would often stay hidden behind curtains and screesn. The doctor was allowed to touch enough of her body to complete his exmaination, often just the pulse taking. This would lead to situations where the symptoms and the doctor's diagnosis did not agree and the doctor would have to ask to see more of the patient.

Another example of where we can see the relationship betwee gender and medicine is by analyzing the illustrations that are in the Yazuan yizong jinjian (Imperially-Commissioned Golden Mirror of Medical Learning) which was a textbook and guide to practicing medicine under the Qianlong emperor's Imperial Academy of Medicine. [1] Most images in this book are depeicted as men, implying that there are culturally and historically constructed assumptions about the characteristics of men and women. There was a long standing belief that women's bodies were an imperfect variant of men's. There existed a type of visual androcentrism in Chinese medicine where there was a tendancy to use male figures to represnt the generic human body. This is seen as a result of the tradition in which men were used in generic situtiaons and women were used only in contexts spcifically genered as female.

Yin Yang and Gender
Yin yang relationships developed a gendered body and was thought of as different depending on if the patient was male for female. In a traditional sense, yin yang relationships could tell the doctor a lot about his patient. Taking the pulse of their patients was important in revealing this kind of information. To doctors during the 16th century, the pulse of females and males were different.

Gender was presumed to influence the movement of energy and a well-trained physician would be expected to read the pulse and should have been able to identify two dozen or more energy flows. Yin and yang name the feminine and masculine aspects of all bodies at large, thus the logic implies that even in nature the differences separating men and women begin at the level of this energy flow. According to Bequeathed Writings of Master Chu writes that the male's yang pulse movement follows an ascending path in "compliance [with cosmic direction] so that the cycle of circulation in the body and the Vital Gate are felt...The female's yin pulse movement follows a defending path against the direction of cosmic influences, so that the nadir and the Gate of Life are felt at the inch position of the left hand". In sum, classical medicine marked yin and yang as high and low on bodies which in turn would be labeled normal or abnormal and gendered either male or female. This would in turn be eventuated by doctors to determine their reproductive capacity.