Retired Associate Professor, Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins Medicine; Affilliate Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany
Marta Hanson received her PhD in the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania (1997). She publishes widely on the history of medicine in China, public health in East Asia, and connected early modern Sino-European medical history. She was Assistant Professor of Late Imperial Chinese history at the University of California, San Diego (1997-2004), Associate Professor of East Asian medical history in the History of Medicine Department, Johns Hopkins University (2004-2021), and President of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (ISHEASTM, 2015-2019). She is now an independent scholar, the Vice-President of the International Society for the Critical Study of Divination (2023-), and an affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Max-Plank-Institut für Wissenschafts-geschichte) in Berlin. She was Senior Co-editor of Asian Medicine: the Journal of the International Association of the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine (2012-2017). Her first book is Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease andthe Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011). Her current book manuscript, Grasping Heaven and Earth: The Mind in Hand in Chinese Medicine, examines how premodern Chinese healers used their hands to think with, diagnose, treat, and heal. Within cross-cultural medical history, she has co-authored with Gianna Pomata (early modern European historian) several publications related to the Specimen Medicinæ Sinicæ (1682), the first translation into Latin of Chinese medical texts. They are working on a grounded global microhistory of 17th-century Sino-European medical exchange.