Using a case study approach, this study will unearth what really happened in the model 1956-59 Anti-Schistosomiasis campaign and determine its implications for current health crises. In addition, the repeated smaller schistosomiasis campaigns from 1959 to the present will also be explored to examine the trajectory of rural public health efforts from their height during the Mao Zedong era, to their increasing neglect in the current profit-oriented health system. The role science played through “scientific planning”, standardization, quantification, and attempts at instilling an experimental culture at the bottom level, and the wider issue of introducing and enacting modern science and Western health among a naive rural population will be the study’s primary focus.