Wayne Soon

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Credentials

PhD

Bio

Wayne Soon is an Associate Professor in the Program of the History of Medicine in the Department of Surgery and the Program of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and his Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and previously taught at Earlham College and Vassar College.

Dr. Soon is a historian of medicine as well as modern China and Taiwan, with an interest in how international ideas and practices of medicine, institutional building, and diaspora have shaped Chinese East Asia’s interaction with its people and the world in the twentieth century. His book, Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History (Stanford University Press, 2020), tells the global health history of Chinese East Asia through the lens of diasporic Chinese medical personnel, who were central in introducing new practices of military medicine, blood banking, mobile medicine, and mass medical training to China and Taiwan. Universal care, practical medical education, and mobile medicine are all lasting legacies of this effort on both sides of the Taiwan Straits.

His current research projects centers around the history of health insurance and medical practices in postwar China and Taiwan and the transpacific history of SARS and COVID-19. He is also the editor for a forthcoming special issue in the East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal entitled “Biogeopolitics of Health Insurance in East and Southeast Asia.”

Dr. Soon is a frequent contributor to The Diplomat, a Washington D.C. based current affairs magazine. He has also published scholarly articles in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Twentieth Century China, American Journal of Chinese Studies, and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal.

Research Summary

History of Global Health; History of Medicine in China; History of Health Insurance; History of SARS and COVID-19

Selected Publications:

Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 

Transpacific Taiwanese Americans and the Global Fight against Covid-19, Global China Pulse 2, no. 1 (2023): 104-113. 

Military Medicine in East Asia: Histories of Instrumentalism, Resistance, and Agency, East Asian Science, Technology, and Society 17, no. 2 (2023): 222-231.

From SARS to COVID-19: Rethinking Global Health Lessons from Taiwan, East Asian Science, Technology, and Society 14, no. 4 (2020): 647–655.

“Taiwan as Study Abroad,” American Journal for Chinese Studies, 27, no. 1 (April 2020): 66–68.

“Blood, Soy Milk, and Vitality: The Wartime Origins of Blood Banking in China, 1943–45,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90 no. 3 (2016): 424-454. (Article was awarded the Zhu Kezhen Junior Scholar Prize by ISHEASTM in 2019)

“Science, Medicine, and Confucianism in the Making of China and Southeast Asia – Lim Boon Keng and the Overseas Chinese, 1897 to 1937,” Twentieth-Century China 39, no. 1 (2014): 24-43.

Teaching Summary

History of Medicine; History of Infectious Disease; History of Modern China and Taiwan; History of Global Health; History of Health Insurance

Service Summary

Professional Associations

• American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM)
• American Historical Association
• Association for Asian Studies