With three dedicated Isis Focus sections, one special issue of Annals of Science, and a spate of related monographs, translation has in the past decade emerged as a key theme in histories of science and medicine, in no small part propelling their ongoing ‘global turn’. Formative in the rise of these studies has been the work of Harold Cook, whose oft-cited Matters of Exchange elaborated a masterful account of how the Dutch commercial empire’s networks shaped early modern medicine and natural history. There already, Cook had dedicated a chapter to the pathways by which knowledge of acupuncture, moxibustion and pulse diagnosis circulated from East Asia to Europe. The six case studies collected together by Cook in this tidy edited volume – the result of a workshop at Brown University in 2014 – thus serve as a logical extension to his prior efforts, richly documenting the plurality of early modern engagements with Chinese medicine.
That plurality of Chinese medicine is consciously at the volume’s core. A global approach informed by translation, Cook tells us in his introduction, reveals first and foremost, that ‘Chinese medicine,’ far from being a monolithic entity, was diverse and malleable, transformed over and again through a ‘variety of adaptive responses’ (p. 9). Exploration of these adaptive responses begins with two chapters treating Jesuit brokerage. Marta Hanson and Gianna Pomata examine the translation of the Tuzhu maijue bianzhen (c.1510) pulse treatise, comparing its Persian translation during the Ilkhanate with Michael Boym’s Latin translation in the Specimen medicinae sinicae (1682) and Julien-Placide Hervieu’s French translation included in Du Halde’s Description géographique (1735). Beatriz Puente-Ballasteros then examines Manchu palace memorials in order to recreate Jesuit attempts – unsuccessful – to introduce chocolate as a general restorative to the Qing court. Thereafter come a series of three essays focussed more explicitly on the responses of practitioners themselves, primarily in Japan, but also in Germanophone territories. Wayne Tan uses Ten Rhijne’s De acupunctura (1683) to tease out Japanese divergences in acupunctural practice, centred on the contested site of the abdomen, while Daniel Trambaiolo shows how mid-seventeenth century Chinese treatises on epidemics inspired Japanese physicians to develop novel techniques of scraping and bloodletting. A parallel process is described in Margaret Garber’s study of the ‘interpretive domestication’ of moxibustion by the Academia Naturae Curiosorum: contending humoral and iatrochemical understandings, as well as the application of local substances, transformed moxa sinensi into moxa germanica. Finally, Motoichi Terada’s chapter unpacks the merging of Chinese sphygmology with neo-Hippocratism in works by Jean-Joseph Menuret and Henri Fouquet in particular, highlighting the role of Chinese pulse diagnosis in the development of Montpellier vitalism.
Critiques of circulation have stressed the need to account for what failed to travel, and the volume’s contributors are keenly aware of this question. Specific remedies and techniques from East Asia elicited the greatest interest, while underlying cosmological and theoretical systems proved far less mobile – ignored, misunderstood or else consciously discarded in favour of local systems. Yet, ironically, this may precisely have been what allowed translation to thrive. Hanson and Pomata place special emphasis on the availability of ‘commensurable textual forms’ in overcoming the incommensurability of content (p. 56). One might suggest that formal structures more generally created a mansion for housing the tremendous substantive variability of Chinese medicine on display in these chapters. Extracted from the broader systems in which they were embedded, specific techniques entered, in Garber’s words, into a ‘liminal space’ of the ‘multiple, heterogeneous and particularly ambiguous’ (p. 156), susceptible to constant reinterpretation and reinsertion into new frameworks.
Insights as above render this volume essential for researchers interested in the globalization of Chinese medicine, complementing such earlier works as Linda Barnes’ Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts and Roberta Bivins’ Acupuncture, Expertise, and Cross-Cultural Medicine. More undecided is how precisely the volume wishes to add to debates in global history. The Jesuit mission in late imperial China, for instance, has long received attention, as have Tokugawa medicine’s negotiations with continental influence. Is global history merely the sum of these pre-existing fields, now unified under a flashier new banner? Or does the sum offer a greater whole – perhaps a new picture of the early modern world? Concepts of brokerage, circulation, mediation and translation purport to disrupt both Eurocentric narratives of science and medicine as well as the civilizational units of comparative world history. But all too often, they remain within conventional geographies. The result, in this volume and others like it, is an equally problematic duocentrism: we are ultimately caught within the worn ellipse of East Asia and Europe, the former defined still by China and Japan, the latter primarily by western European nations. Glimpses of a more motley and subversive geography are scattered throughout these essays. We see mention of an ‘Indian doctress’ in Batavia engaged in moxibustion (p. 137); we are told of Mongolian surgeons and Tibetan healers at the Qing court (p. 65). Hanson and Pomata do, to their credit, offer sustained treatment of the late medieval Persian translation of the Maijue, but one wonders about the continued early modern interactions between Chinese and Arabo-Persian natural philosophy explored by scholars like Dror Weil. Puente-Ballesteros briefly discusses New World knowledge of chocolate, but one wonders about those Chinese practitioners in Mexico City, armed with their ‘nine needles’, of which Spanish barbers complained (p. 12). Related to this is the question of the ‘first global age’ raised in the volume’s title. How are we going to understand the capacious hybridity and pluralism of the early modern in relation to the globalised modern biomedicine that would follow? Terada’s concluding chapter teases one possibility, suggesting that one might trace Chinese sphygmology through vitalism into ‘the theoretical basis of biology’ (p. 205). The exploration of these unexpected geographies, actors and afterlives offers promising leads for the future as the global history of medicine matures. Although this erudite and informative volume does not fully explore them, it plants the seeds of inquiry, making it a heartily welcome contribution.
