During the first period of globalization medical ideas and practices originating in China became entangled in the medical activities of other places, sometimes at long distances. They produced effects through processes of alteration once known as translatio, meaning movements in place, status, and meaning. The contributors to this volume examine occasions when intermediaries responded creatively to aspects of Chinese medicine, whether by trying to pass them on or to draw on them in furtherance of their own interests. Practitioners in Japan, at the imperial court, and in early and late Enlightenment Europe therefore responded to translations creatively, sometimes attempting to build bridges of understanding that often collapsed but left innovation in their wake.
Contributors are Marta Hanson, Gianna Pomata, Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros, Wei Yu Wayne Tan, Margaret Garber, Daniel Trambaiolo, and Motoichi Terada.
Harold J. Cook, Ph.D. (1981), University of Michigan, is the John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University and former professor of the History of Medicine at UCL. He is an award-winning author on the history of medicine and related subjects.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Translating Chinese Medical Ways in the Early Modern Period Harold J. Cook
1 Travels of a Chinese Pulse Treatise: The Latin and French Translations of the Tuzhu maijue bianzhen 圖註脈訣辨真 (1650s–1730s) Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata
2 Chocolate in China: Interweaving Cultural Histories of an Imperfectly Connected World Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros
3 Rediscovering Willem ten Rhijne’s De Acupunctura: The Transformation of Chinese Acupuncture in Japan Wei Yu Wayne Tan
4 Domesticating Moxa: The Reception of Moxibustion in a Late Seventeenth-Century German Medical Journal Margaret D. Garber
5 Epidemics and Epistemology in Early Modern Japan: Japanese Responses to Chinese Writings on Warm Epidemics and Sand-Rashes Daniel Trambaiolo
6 The Montpellier Version of Sphygmology: Classical Chinese Medicine and Vitalism Motoichi Terada
Index
All concerned with connected histories of medicine, the effects of Chinese medicine in the first age of globalisation, and the study of translation as provocation.