Abstract:  During the period of the late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, medical novels distributed in commercial newspapers, medical special issues and literary journals stood out as unique literary genres given the context of “the spreading of western medicine to the East”. Different from those traditional medical writings that conveyed symbolic connotation of medicine, medical novels during this period abandoned the “metaphorical” tradition, and returned to the pure medical theme with a purpose of advocating science and change, and then facilitating the establishment of modern medicine in China. Therefore, they were highly “instrumental” with distinct characteristics of the times. Viewing from the interaction between literature and medicine, we can find that the medical novels in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China achieved emotional mobilization, knowledge production and broad consensus by various means such as exposing and criticizing the shortcomings of the medical community at the time, popularizing bacteriological knowledge with the joint efforts of the media and describing a beautiful Utopian world. As a result, these novels constructed a set of modern medical discourse quite different from the traditional narrative, and facilitated the modern transformation of Chinese medicine to a certain extent.

Key words:  late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China, newspapers and periodicals, medical novels, China’s medicine, modern transformation