Nautilus

What Chinese Medicine Has to Teach Us About New Mothers

Pregnant women attend to a seminar on confinement practices and tasting of postpartum foods at I-San House.Vanessa Hua

In a strip mall in the heart of Silicon Valley, the pregnant ladies were seeking out ancient Chinese cures.

Bellies low and wide, bellies high and round, the women packed into I-San House, sampling bitter chicken and goji berry soup and a tongue-tingling drink of boiled ginger and dates, traditional Chinese dishes to aid in recovery after childbirth. 

In the month after delivery, Chinese women are said to be at their most vulnerable, weakened by labor and blood loss. To heal, they confine themselves at home for 30 days, in a process known as zuo yuezi, or “doing the month.” They stay in bed and slurp down pig knuckles stewed in wine and vinegar, and drink stinking herbal concoctions to flush out the body and increase the production of breast milk. Tradition prohibits visitors, baths, going outside, using fans or air conditioners, sexual activity, brushing teeth, eating raw foods, reading, or crying—as though they were living in the Ming Dynasty, without the benefit of indoor plumbing, clean hot water, or modern medicine.

Research on confinement

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus2 min read
Color-Coding Crops for Climate Change
Green is the color of growth in the plant world. From an aerial view, most farms blanket the land in quilts of varying shades of green. But what if the stems and leaves of your average corn, barley, and rice plants were hairy and blue instead? One te
Nautilus7 min read
Insects and Other Animals May Have Consciousness
In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Give
Nautilus7 min read
A Radical Rescue for Caribbean Reefs
It’s an all-too-familiar headline: Coral reefs are in crisis. Indeed, in the past 50 years, roughly half of Earth’s coral reefs have died. Coral ecosystems are among the most biodiverse and valuable places on Earth, supporting upward of 860,000 speci

Related Books & Audiobooks