Neither Donkey nor Horse is a tremendous accomplishment that marks Sean Hsiang-lin Lei as a leading historian of Chinese medicine and a major thinker in STS. The book draws together years of Lei's research and publications, but it is far more than a simple summary of past work. Lei places Chinese medicine in an ambitious new framework and offers an insightful examination of the nature of Chinese modernity. The book is not exclusively about traditional Chinese medicine, nor is it entirely a book about Western medicine. Instead, each of the work's eleven chapters probes different aspects of the complex interweavings of medicine, science, and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Its central concern is to highlight processes through which Chinese medicine transformed in the twentieth century to become a different "species, " a species that coevolved, through pointed engagements with science, along with the emerging modern Chinese state.
