The recent global turn in early modern studies and the history of science and medicine has revealed that zones of cross-cultural contact were the most active sites of knowledge-making, where inherited local traditions were contested and reimagined, and important innovations came into being. But this new scholarship has largely focused on interactions across the Atlantic or on the spread of European culture in non-Western societies. This excellent volume on the global encounters of Chinese medicine in the early modern era offers a much-needed corrective to this historiographic imbalance.
As Cook points out in the editor's introduction, until its modern transformation, Chinese medicine comprised a multitude of medical ways that originated from different geographic regions and ethnic communities in historical China. This volume examines how and under what historical circumstances they were brought across places, languages, and cultures around the globe. He notes that such cross-cultural journeys necessarily implicate translation, which provides a bridge across different linguistic and cultural worlds but may also sow seeds of misunderstanding. He invokes the old Latin term translatio to capture the wide range of epistemic processes taking place during this translation, including, besides linguistic translation, mediation, dialogue, appropriation, and creative engagement.
The book offers six case studies zooming in on this “translation at work.” The first two chapters center on the Jesuit missionaries in China as intermediaries of Sino-European medical exchange. Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata examine how Michael Boym in the 1650s and Julien-Placide Hervieu in the 1730s translated the same Chinese pulse treatise into Latin and French respectively. Boym undertook the project to unlock what he deemed a supreme medical wisdom yet unknown to his European compatriots, and Hervieu to furnish a firsthand source for the contemporary Europeans with which to settle their debate on whether the Chinese had discovered blood circulation thousands of years ahead of them. The striking contrasts between their translations in textual forms, content emphases, and renderings of Chinese medical concepts dramatize what Dimitri Gutas called the “transformative magic of the translator's pen” (56). Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros tells a captivating story of how a New World delicacy was inducted into Chinese pharmacopoeia. Chocolate was among the gifts Tournon Papal Legation presented to the Kangxi emperor in 1705. Keen on acquiring another potent exotic medicine (like theriac), the emperor requested the Jesuit apothecary Giuseppe Baudino to explain its medicinal properties. Perusing a rich body of European and pre-Columbian knowledge on chocolate, filled with bold claims about its healing efficacies, Baudino nevertheless decided to present chocolate as just another nurturing drink, like tea. What held him back and dashed an opportunity for chocolate to conquer China? The answer to this question takes us from the realm of translation into court politics and beyond.
The complex relationship between Chinese and Japanese medicine is explored in the chapters by Wei Yu Wayne Tan and Daniel Trambaiolo. The first text introducing acupuncture to Europe, De Acupunctura, was composed in Japan by the Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne. Tan uses this text as an archive with which to reconstruct the new lineages of acupuncture emerging in late-seventeenth century Japan, offering glimpses into Chinese acupuncture as it was becoming Japanese. Trambaiolo follows the growth of Japanese medical discourses on epidemics in the mid- and late eighteenth century, fostered by several concurrent early modern developments: the expansion of printing and popular literacy, exposure to European medicine, and the rise of empiricism, as well as frequent epidemic outbreaks. He shows how, within this broader context, Japanese doctors read and interpreted Chinese medical authors with a critical eye, using them primarily as tools to think with and sources of inspiration.
Chapters 4 and 6 turn to the European scene. Margaret D. Garber discusses the dual process of linguistic translation and conceptual domestication accompanying the German reception of Chinese moxibustion after its introduction by Hermann Busschoff's treatise in 1675. The translation of that treatise into Latin and German within the first two years of its Dutch edition introduced Chinese moxa into the German learned discourse on curiosities, generating heated discussions on its morphological and medicinal properties until it was successfully reduced to a variety of the mundane German weed, Artemisia. Motoichi Terada's study, on the other hand, demonstrates that in eighteenth-century France there had been a sustained interest in Chinese sphygmology among members of the Montpellier medical school, who found in it a major ally and important source of inspiration in their challenge against the mainstream, mechanistic world view.
Taken together, the book gives a powerful illustration of the interactive coemergence of early modernity around the world. It also offers profound insights into Chinese, Japanese, European, and Native American medicine and thought during this first global age. Thoroughly researched and beautifully written, this volume is a must-read for scholars and students in the fields of early modern global history, the history of science and medicine, and translation studies, among others.
