Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe

Abstract

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.

Publishing and Medicine: A Potentially Integrated Field?

“…Unlike Pomata’s study of medical case histories in both cultures from a comparative perspective, this article uses a cross-cultural method of analysis. Pomata and Hanson explore the procedures and mechanism of translating recipes from Chinese into Latin which is a combination of translation and transcription, and the application of “typographical devices” including “a vertical structure and an italic font.” 26 This process and the modular character of both Chinese and European formulas accordingly reveal how the recipe could become a bridge across cultures. Pomata and Hanson continue to examine the transmission of Chinese pulse texts through translation.…”

Introduction of human anatomy before modern China: The preface of anatomical education in mainland China

“…The inner view diagram was regarded as the reference anatomical diagram of the human body for later Chinese doctors. Additionally, in 1682, or probably 1,662, the first illustrated book for Western Europe that mentioned anatomy in Chinese medicine, Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (Examples of Chinese Medicine) by the international trader and physician Andreas Cleyer (1634-1,698), was published in Frankfurt, Germany (Hanson & Pomata, 2017;Hsu, 1989). Some anatomists considered that one of the anatomical diagrams in this book is, to some degree, similar to the diagram of the Inner View Diagram (Gao, Pan, & Wu, 2006) (Supplementary Information S1).…”

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