Bretelle-Establet Florence

Florence Bretelle-Establet is a Research Director at CNRS and affiliated with the SPHERE laboratory (UMR 7219) at the University of Paris Diderot. Her work bridges the history of science and medicine, with a specialized focus on China during the Qing Dynasty. She holds a doctorate in Chinese studies and completed her Habilitation to Direct Research on doctors and medicine in the southern margins of the Qing empire.

Her research interests include the history of medicine in China, particularly in southern regions; the historiography of medical knowledge; the structure and circulation of medical texts; and the introduction of Western medicine into China during the 19th and 20th centuries. She has extensively studied how medical authority is constructed through textual practices, such as prefaces and citations, and how epidemics have been interpreted across cultural and historical contexts.

The trends in her recent publications show a consistent engagement with cross-cultural medical history, textual analysis of Chinese medical literature, and the social and intellectual networks that shaped medical knowledge in late imperial China. Her work often emphasizes regional variations, challenging centralized narratives of medical history by focusing on southern China’s unique medical discourses.

• Thesis prize 2000 awarded by the Sino-French Foundation for Education and Culture

Bretelle-Establet has supervised several doctoral students, including Nguyen Thi Duong, Yang Liqiong, and Liang Wenbo, and has co-directed theses on topics ranging from Vietnamese traditional medicine to comparative Greek and Chinese medicine. She has also taught courses on the history of science in Asia and the history of medicine in China at the master’s level. Her editorial roles include serving as co-editor-in-chief of Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident from 2005 to 2015 and contributing to the book review board of East Asian Science, Technology and Society.

She has organized numerous academic events, including international workshops and conferences on the sources of the history of science in Asia, and has been active in public dissemination through media appearances, such as on France Culture, and public lectures at events like the Science Festival and the International History Film Festival.