This essay deals with the medical recipe as an epistemic genre that played an important role in the cross-cultural transmission of knowledge. The article first compares the development of the recipe as a textual form in Chinese and European premodern medical cultures. It then focuses on the use of recipes in the transmission of Chinese pharmacology to Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century. The main sources examined are the Chinese medicinal formulas translated—presumably—by the Jesuit Michael Boym and published in Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), a text that introduced Chinese pulse medicine to Europe. The article examines how the translator rendered the Chinese formulas into Latin for a European audience. Arguably, the translation was facilitated by the fact that the recipe as a distinct epistemic genre had developed, with strong parallels, in both Europe and China. Building on these parallels, the translator used the recipe as a shared textual format that would allow the transfer of knowledge between the two medical cultures.

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This article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents. It finds that in contrast to the European preference for hand metaphors in the genre terms – enchiridions, manuals and handbooks – the Chinese medical archive preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period and is then superseded by metaphors that rely on the fingers and palms more than the hands per se. This longue durée survey from roughly the fourth to the fourteenth centuries of the wide-ranging metaphors for ‘handy medical books’ places their historical emergence and transformation within the history of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Metaphors in medical titles conveyed to potential readers at the time significant textual innovations in how medical knowledge would be presented to them. For later historians, they provide evidence of profound changes in managing an increasingly complex and expanding archive of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Innovations in textual reorganization intended to facilitate ‘learning by the book’ were often creatively captured in an illuminating range of genre distinctions, descriptors and metaphors.

Physicians during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) understood that the Chinese empire was geographically diverse. They observed that their patients were corporeally and physiologically heterogeneous. They interpreted this ecological and human diversity within the reunited Ming Empire according to both an ancient northwest-southeast axis and a new emphasis on north versus south. The geographic distinctions-northern and southern (nanbei ) as well as northwestern (xibei ) and southeastern (dongnan )-similarly helped explain doctrinal and therapeutic divergences within the literate sector of Chinese medicine. They thought about ecological, climatic, and human variation within the framework of a uniquely Chinese northwestsoutheast polarity with roots in Chinese mythology and the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor. They also thought in terms of a north-ern and southern split in medicine, which the Yuan scholar Dai Liang (1317-1383) explicitly mentioned in his writings. The Ming physicians who discussed medical regionalism mostly asserted, however, the opposite; namely their own impartiality as medical authorities for all of China. Nevertheless, their essays on regionalism reveal considerable tensions, fissures, and conflicts in the literate sector of Ming medicine.

In the last month of 1739, the third f the Manchu rulers, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795), ordered the compilation of a treatise on medicine "to rectify medical knowledge" throughout the empire. By the end of 1742, eighty participants chosen from several offices within the palace bureaucracy based in Beijing completed the Golden Mirror of the Orthodox Lineage of Medicine, the only imperially commissioned medical text the Qing government's Imperial Printing Office published. The Golden Mirror represents both the limitations in the power of the Qianlong emperor and the dominance in the Manchu court of Chinese scholarship from the Jiangnan region during the first decade of his reign. Chinese scholars participating in the compilation of the Golden Mirror fashioned a medical orthodoxy for the empire in the mid-eighteenth century from regional trends since the sixteenth century. The Golden Mirror is an illuminating example of how medical scholars participated in the formation of evidential scholarship in early-modern China and why Manchu patronage, southern Chinese scholarship, and medical orthodoxy, coalesced in the imperial court of the Qianlong emperor.