Creative Misunderstandings
CHINESE MEDICINE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE
Harold J. Cook
INTRODUCTION
Historians of medicine, no less than others, are facing up to the implications for our subject in light of “global” history. The challenges of thinking about a global history of any kind are very great, but they may be greatest for fields that consider aspects of the history of ideas. Global history is a very important tool for representing connections among people based on the exchange of goods, objects, and specimens, which can flow across cultural borders and be meaningfully reinscribed in new contexts. But while the movement of material things may set the stage for exchanges of knowledge, too, decades of work in cultural studies have taught us that many kinds of knowledge are embedded in practices and languages, remaining meaningful only within the contexts from which they emerge. How “ideas” can move from place to place therefore poses fundamental questions.1
In some of my previous historical research and writing, the problem of the mobility of knowledge emerged as something not to be overlooked. In structuring arguments about the development of medicine and science during the Dutch Golden Age, and their connections with commerce, one process that became of most interest was the way in which objects and careful descriptions of them could be easily moved from place to place. The development of the hope for a universal “science” that would apply to all times and places arose in part from processes that gave careful attention to exotic naturalia, which were stripped of cultural context when imported to Europe. While the people who interacted with such things in situ endowed them with rich associations, Dutch investigators in the Indies and in the home country, who wrote for an international audience, focused their attention on carefully conveying their materialistic aspects, describing their physical substance and appearance, and medicinal and culinary benefits, and little else. Objects and information about them moved readily, but local discourses about their meanings and associations did not.
For instance, the physician Jacobus Bontius, who resided in the new capital of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), Batavia (now Jakarta), in the late 1620s and early 1630s, wrote several manuscripts on the medicine and natural history of the East Indies that were published posthumously in the 1640s. In these works, he describes plants and animals carefully, often having fine drawings of them made that also appeared in one of them. His investigations relied on local informants for information about their behaviors and uses. He came to admire the people of the region for the enormous fund of knowledge they possessed, even publicly defending them against some compatriots’ accusations that they were “barbarians” or worse (and doing so shortly after the virtual extermination of the people of the Banda Islands by the Dutch in the interest of monopolizing the trade in nutmeg). But at the same time, he stripped away what he considered the “superstitions” that his informants associated with the objects of his interest. Nor did Bontius ever comment on the explanations that he must have heard about how various substances worked their healthful effects. Bontius’s implicitly materialist information about the objects and substances of the East Indies was easily understood anywhere people had access to his words and pictures, but it conveyed little of their local meanings.2
Erasure of some kinds of knowledge in the process of transporting other kinds of knowledge was not the only process at work, however. So, too, were examples of what now look like failed attempts by Dutch authors to understand the views of their interlocutors. An example of this comes from the work of a very well-educated young physician, Willem ten Rhijne, who had been sent by the VOC to Japan in the expectation that he would become a physician to the Shogun. Ten Rhijne resided at Deshima, the Dutch station in Nagasaki, for two years.3 He had with him at least one Chinese medical text, including authentic diagrams of the channels and points “which,” he later wrote, “had long been neglected and ignored through want of an interpreter.” Ten Rhijne “made every effort to meet a Japanese physician … with a knowledge of Chinese” in order to understand the manuscript. Therefore, in the course of answering many questions about medicine that were put to him by Japanese physicians and officials, he reversed the questioning. One of his interlocutors, Iwanaga Sōko, who had been trained in Chinese medicine, did his best to translate the texts into Japanese, and one of the chief interpreters, Shōdayū Motogi, then did his best to render the result into Dutch. There were no dictionaries for such a process, so they proceeded by discussion, during which there must have been countless frustrations about making sense of one another’s words. Ten Rhijne then transformed what he heard into Latin.4 Consequently, while ten Rhijne gleaned elements of a brief account of the history and practice of medicine in East Asia, given his method of working, and the peculiar Romanization of Chinese names with Japanese pronunciation, he offered far from a transparent translation. Indeed, it is not yet even clear what the original text was from which the “translation” was made.5
Thus, some kinds of knowledge, such as information units that point to material things, can move readily, while other kinds are sticky. “Medicine” includes both. Medicinal substances and instructions on their administration can be transported from place to place relatively easily, while the assumptions about well-being, illness, and treatment in one part of the world are not easily transported to another. The latter are framed in words that depend on language, upbringing, repertoire of expression and gesture, ways of life, artifacts, expectations, and even ideas that make up the frameworks we often term “culture.” It is notoriously difficult to explain a culture to another person who has not lived in it, even when the person knows something of the language. While it is certainly possible to look for underlying commonalities among peoples and cultures, the main interpretative method in the humanities and ethnographically inspired social sciences during the late twentieth century was to stress differences. The stimulating recent work of Geoffrey Lloyd is a fine example of the kinds of problems raised by contrasting the quest for human similarities (often framed as a shared biology) or our different upbringings (often framed as distinct cultures) that are important in, say, color perception or emotional expression.6
The history of cultures approach is also very able in showing how silence, avoidance, subordination, misunderstanding, and negotiation might be as important as conflict and coercion. But it has also accepted that in differences of expression lurks “incommensurability” (to use a word adopted from philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend).7 Originally meaning the absence of a common measure that would allow comparison—the absence of the Euclidian proposition that, say, the length of a line can be measured by a series of congruent segments—the term was used to indicate the fundamental difference between one scientific worldview and another: one could not get one set of results from the propositions of the other system, so that the results depend not only on matters such as experimental findings but also on the assumptions of the theories by which they are measured. The application of incommensurability rapidly made its way into many discussions of problems where no common agreement among basic propositions exists. According to some lines of argument, cultures, too, may be incommensurable, making meaningful “translation” between patterns of expression impossible.
An example of an argument for fundamental differences between East Asian and Western European medical practices has been made brilliantly by Shigehisa Kuriyama, in his The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (1999). He examined a practice that seems common to both but turns out to be very different: the “pulse.” When Europeans examined Chinese medical methods, they thought they saw practitioners “feel the pulse.” This is one among many aspects of “Chinese medicine” that seem to be “just like” classical medicine in Europe before the so-called scientific revolution.8 But, Kuriyama argues, Europeans who felt the pulse and Chinese who felt the mo were experiencing their bodies and their clients’ bodies in very different ways. Literate European practitioners understood the body in terms of its solid anatomy, whereas literate Chinese practitioners had a geographical understanding of its changes. The two were therefore attentive to different bodily experiences and oriented toward different interpretative statements of their meanings; consequently they also touched differently. “By the evidence of the eyes, qiemo, palpating the mo, was unmistakably pulse diagnosis. Chinese writings [however,] testified that the eyes were wrong. The hermeneutics of the Mojue were unlike any dialect of the pulse language known in Europe.” He goes on to ask, “How can gestures look the same, yet differ entirely in the experience?” Since people had different experiences of embodiment, the explanations they offered for their actions were incompatible. Or, as many Europeans of the time were wont to say, Chinese explanations about their methods—something many people referred to as their “philosophy,” as we would now speak of their “theory”—were not simply “mistaken,” but were “ridiculous,” “phantastical,” “chaotic,” or “absurd.”9 To Kuriyama, in these differences there is incommensurability: that is, the European and Chinese understandings of the pulse were each necessarily uncomprehending of the other, because the framework of each was based on fundamentally different kinds of evidence and interpretation.
The interconnections among peoples to which global history directs our attention therefore certainly require exploration, but a part of that attentiveness must be given to the variety of kinds of knowledge that are transported or are not. As a working hypothesis we might say that some kinds of knowledge move relatively easily from place to place because it is about objects. The meanings attached to the objects in the places of their origin can be neglected or silenced (although some meanings—such as their “exotic” origin—may move with them despite the silencing). Other kinds of knowledge are stickier, such as when one enters into the process of translation, especially in cases where one or more of the languages is unfamiliar.10 It may even be that full and transparent interchanges of this kind are impossible because of underlying incommensurabilities. Yet, as with the example of ten Rhijne, people often attempt to overcome the differences despite the difficulties and misunderstandings. The reappropriation of distant knowledge is therefore a creative and meaningful process deserving investigation in its own right. Even when they do not replicate the original in another language, the results can be meaningful and influential. Even misunderstandings have consequences.
My method below takes two main lines of interpretation for exploring such problems. One is to use the “global” as a way to explore many interconnected microhistories. The global history that emerged in the 1990s was distinct from most of the forms of world history that came before, mainly because it took both economic and interactive histories as its focus. It no longer was meant to be a comparative history of civilizations or places, but “connected” history, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam would term it, or histoire croisée and similar terms in other languages, in which changes in one place affected changes in another.11 An early version had been Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world-system” approach, which explained the development of Europe’s economic domination in terms of its maritime enterprises in interaction with, and sometimes even dependence on, people of the “peripheries.”12 Much of his evidence drew on, and further stimulated, a great number of outstanding studies of European trade around the early modern Indian Ocean.13 With a rising tide of suspicion about Eurocentrism, however, it became clear that the “center” of such trade was not Europe but the lands around the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, which were of course connected to the rest of the world.14 The interactive aspects of the economies of different places therefore demanded more and more attention. A consequence was a wider adoption of the view made clear by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large (1996): the “global” is made up of many “locals.”15 Then, in the late 1990s, several works gained widespread attention for arguing that the main stimulus for world trade in the early modern period was China: R. Bin Wong’s China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (1997), Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1999), and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000).16 The first two studies sought to demonstrate that Eurocentric social theory of either the Marxist or Weberian kind had failed to understand the ways in which regions such as China functioned, both as imperial realms and as economic systems. In their works, however, “China” is not so much a nation as a region of interconnected trading zones and ethnic groups competing for power, like “Europe,” although unlike Europe the empire discouraged armed violence as a method of competition.17
In foregrounding the material foundations of large patterns of history, and in shifting attention from the development of European power to a more interactionist model of change, global histories have been both iconoclastic and productive. The new “global” history, therefore, had three legs. It set its face against histories of civilizations and ideological formations, even those that made culture primary, in favor of material interactions as the chief causes of change. It self-consciously treated the nation-state, too, as a political artifact rather than a natural geographical or cultural unit. And, at least for the period before the Industrial Revolution, it placed East Asia at the center of the story rather than Europe. It has been attentive to the eruptive geographies of sea-borne commerce and to the inland “sea” of the Central Asian steppe (the “Silk Road”), rather than to the agricultural lands of long-settled populations. The best examples of the new global histories explicitly reject the kinds of essentialist comparisons that require anyone to group people according civilizations. There are large regions and millions of people in view, but while they may be approached according to one grouping or another, they live in often eclectic mixtures. In each region, there are diverse languages and cultures, rather than single ethnic or ideological totalities. In other words, the examples from the new global histories are mobility and interaction. They do not presume unitary cultures or civilizations, but allow for multiple ones coexisting within the same domain. In all these ways and more, global history has stimulated much rethinking about patterns of historical change, with the small scale as important as the large.
But when one puzzles about interactions among peoples that might be termed ideological or even intellectual, global history poses serious challenges. The vision of a global movement of peoples and goods has plenty of space in it for the exchange of certain kinds of information, but not much for the history of concepts, much less ideologies or even experiences. The exchange of people, practices, information, and goods—and diseases—via merchants, missionaries, soldiers, and the like has clearly been important. The major actors in such transactions were, after all, neither nation-states nor “civilizations,” but travelers, intermediaries, and brokers of various kinds.18 Yet their ability to convey culture-bound “ideas” is far from clear. Analysis must therefore be explored at the level of persons and their interactions as well as at the level of collective processes, and we must expect misinformation and misunderstanding to be as important as transparency.
The second method that I employ below is to explore the process of appropriation of knowledge from afar not by way of a developmental narrative but by a process of excavation. This account begins with the work of an English physician of the early eighteenth century, Sir John Floyer, who is well known to have taken a keen interest in Chinese pulse taking as a part of his own attempts to develop novel methods of diagnosis and treatment. It reports on his work and views, and then explores the sources on which he drew, moving to the seventeenth century in time and to East Asia in place. In so doing, we can see what many others were doing without presuming that history is teleological. Instead, it is enough to assume that people make use of the materials available to them, and even sometimes try to find new materials, in constructing accounts for their own purposes of the moment. They do so not knowing the full story of how those materials came into being nor why, and so borrowing and using words in ways that had not necessarily been intended by the earlier authors. This is a method often employed in comparative literature and other subject areas, and seems especially helpful here as a way to avoid a forward-looking narrative when each step was entangled in a multiplicity of interacting interests and opinions.
So to the problem at hand: in the historical record there are many attempts to obtain a comprehension of other views. It is especially notable in cases where someone in one part of the world sought knowledge of someplace else. Such efforts often presented serious difficulties for the persons attempting mastery of the distant, and may have led to as much or more misinformation and misunderstanding as comprehension. Among such efforts were exchanges between East Asian and European scholars about those aspects of knowledge we term science, technology, and medicine, as well as attempts by still others to draw on the result of such exchanges for their own purposes. The understandings and misunderstandings of such quests have left their legacy in various languages even today. When coining terminology to convey the chemical language of Lavoissier into Japanese, for instance, scholars borrowed words from Buddhist and other kinds of religious and philosophical traditions that brought their own implications.19 Similarly, as we will see below, when translating Chinese medical terms into European languages, Jesuit authors borrowed from an ancient and medieval language of bodily powers such as the humidum radicale (for yin) or calidum innatum (for yang). The results may have been incomplete and even misleading; but they nevertheless sometimes lead to creative responses. If the global approach toward examining connected histories is worth adopting but has only begun to examine the ways in which information and meaning were conveyed from place to place, then having another look at the early modern attempts by Europeans to understand Chinese medical ideas and practices may be illuminating.
SIR JOHN FLOYER AND THE DEFENSE OF CHINESE MEDICINE
A good example of a European response to East Asian medical ideas comes from Sir John Floyer’s enthusiastic advocacy for his new method of diagnosing disease from counting the beats of the pulse. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Floyer was a physician living in Litchfield, in the English midlands north of Birmingham. Samuel Johnson enthusiasts know him as the doctor who, when the young boy was suffering from scrofula, recommended he travel to London to obtain the royal touch from Queen Anne. Like Johnson, he was probably a Tory, having been granted a knighthood in 1684, no doubt due to his support for James during the succession crisis. He was certainly patriotic in arguing that the greatest physician ever had been William Harvey. But during these years of often bitter medical and scientific disputes Floyer was no simple conservative, instead thinking of himself as a major innovator, advocating cold water bathing and new treatments for asthma, for instance. One might imagine that his main aim was to bring the new science of his day, including an interest in both quantitative reasoning and natural history, to the support of individualist and classically oriented medicine. In this way, he was supportive of utilitarian novelties while hoping to build on and preserve what he considered to be the best traditions of his profession.20
Floyer is well known for being an advocate for counting the beats of the pulse as a diagnostic method with direct implications for therapy and, in making a case for his new system, for allying himself with concepts and methods from China as well as from classical antiquity.21 In aligning himself with practices he described as four thousand years old, he was demonstrating how he had found the key to unlocking an almost eternal set of medical truths. In that sense, it does not matter whether his interpretations of Chinese texts on the pulse were correct or authentic, only that he was creating a view of the subject that could help persuade readers of his (English) text. At the same time, Floyer was investing considerable effort in trying to acquire accurate information about Chinese methods of taking the pulse—already made famous by travel writers—and to read and interpret the available Latin texts on the subject, which were in turn translations from Chinese. While Floyer’s story is well known for his reformation of pulse taking and genuflection to China and Greece, it is worth another look at his interpretative practices before turning to a further examination of the Latin texts he relied upon. Floyer’s methods and interpretations give a revealing picture of how one culture might have effects on another, even when the translation of concepts was not a simple one-to-one movement.
Floyer announced his new method in 1707, in The Physicians’ Pulse-Watch, which set out both a new method of practice and a new invention.22 The invention was a watch with a hand that circled the dial in sixty seconds, in effect introducing the second-hand mechanism, which Floyer had commissioned from the London clockmaker Samuel Watson. It had become a necessary adjunct to his new clinical method. Floyer had for some years tried to measure the time during various treatments such as his method of preventative and curative cold bathing (which had already become a subject of some controversy). He also began to measure the number of beats of the pulse per minute. Measuring the time accurately proved to be a challenge. Initially, he had referred to the minute hand on common watches and pendulum clocks in the homes of his patients before hitting on the more accurate “common Sea-Minute Glass” (a kind of hourglass for measuring a half minute when heaving out the log from a ship in order to count the knots).23 The sea glass was not portable, however, so he “caused a Pulse-Watch to be made which run 60 Seconds, and I placed it in a Box to be more easily carried, and by this I now feel Pulses.” (He found that the watch ran a bit faster than his minute glass, so he regulated it by adding five or six to the number of pulse beats counted by the watch.)24
The reason Floyer sought to measure the number of beats of the pulse grew from his interest in finding clear and apparent signs of natural changes in the body that would be diagnostic and allow successful remedies for disease. He stood among the many physicians of his day who thought of disease as a falling away from the rightly balanced state of well-being rather than as a thing in itself that needed to be fought off.25 That is, when it came to understanding illness, he stood in the “physiological” rather than the “ontological” camp.26 Perhaps his interest in cold water bathing as a method of treatment arose from the contemporary enthusiasm for both drinking and bathing in mineral waters, since in his 1697 book on the subject he comments on his methods for analyzing the waters. There he also briefly described the action of hot and cold baths on the pulse.27 By 1702, when he published a work strongly advocating the use of cold baths, he had clearly begun to explore the effects of cold, hot, and many other qualities and environmental influences, using the pulse as the chief indicator of the physiological state of the patient.28 By the time of the Pulse-Watch, he was able to provide a series of “tables” indicating the varying number of beats of the pulse per minute according to the degree of latitude, age of the patent, time of day, fasting or full stomach, hot or cold diet, and so on.29
Using the pulse as a diagnostic sign was a long-standing tradition in European medicine. Galen had considered the study of the pulse (sphygmology) to be the most important of all diagnostic methods, devoting sixteen books to the subject.30 At the time of Floyer’s youth, it was still important. In a 1662 English partial translation of Jean Fernel’s famous oeuvre, taking the pulse remained as fundamental to diagnosis as examining urines. The two “declare diseases what they are, for the Pulse shews the Constitution of the Heart, and Arteries, and the Urine declares the Constitution of the Liver, and the veins, by the administration of which the whol body is governed.” By that time, a rich and ambiguous language had accreted for expressing the variety of kinds of pulses. They could be ordinate or inordinate; equal or unequal; recurrent or intercurrent; soft or hard; robust and vehement, or weak and faint; small or full; “often” or infrequent; stretched, wave-like, vibrant, trembling, serrant, or convulsive; or formicant (ant-like), vermiculant (worm-like), myurus (mouse-tailed), or caprizant (uneven)—and many other things as well.31 One of Floyer’s chief concerns was to clarify the enormously complex qualitative language of the pulse used around him by applying a quantitative measure.32 Using his pulse watch to count the number of beats per minute, Floyer reclassified pulses into three basic kinds, rapid (hot), slow (cold), and irregular (“cacochymic”), with only a few further subdivisions. As he later boasted, “The Art of feeling the Pulse, which I have propos’d … ’tis short, easie, and more certain than the Galenical or Chinese Art, because it requires no more than counting of the Pulse, and observing the time by the Pulse-Watch; this will shew the Disease of the Fluids, that is, of the Blood and Spirits; and the Method to raise or sink the Pulse.”33
Contained in that last phrase about his “Method to raise or sink the Pulse” was what Floyer considered to be the most important part of his discovery: it was no mere diagnostic technique but a means to accurate treatment. In this sense Floyer thought of himself as imitating the Chinese, who were reputed to use the pulse in treatment as well as diagnosis. The rapidity of the pulse indicated the state of a person’s circulation, which was for Floyer, as a Harveian, the seat of all physiological processes. Therefore, once the state of a person’s physiology had been found, any underlying problems could be treated by prescribing a regimen that would work by contraries to bring the patient’s physiology back to a golden mean.34 He even imagined that “Dr. [William] Harvey did design a Tract about the Pulse, as he intimates, which if he had done he would have pursu’d his Scheme, and drawn it into Practice” along the lines that Floyer had discovered.35 Accordingly, “the exceeding Pulses will require the cool Tastes, and the deficient Pulses indicate the hot Tastes.” But, he also recognized, “by this Method we shall imitate the Chinese Practice.”36 It was in the close bond between feeling the pulse and treating diseases that Floyer thought he was imitating the Chinese. “The Greeks used their ars sphugmon for Prognostications chiefly, and also a part of the Semiotica; but the Chinese also have made that a part of their Therapeutics, as well as of the other; for from the Pulse they take their Indications for cure, in which they excell’d the Greeks.” Put another way, by counting the pulse Floyer believed he had made a great advance on the classical systems of pulse taking, but when he tied his new method of semiotics to therapeutics, and “reflected on what I had done, I found my Notions hit with the Chinese Practice.”37
At first, he had little material about Chinese medicine to hand. But he had enough to draw his conclusions. He wrote the Pulse-Watch in three parts: the first corrected the Galenic method of “feeling the pulse” in light of his method of counting the beats; the second explained his “mechanical” method of treating diseases according to measuring the indications of the pulse; and the last described “The Chinese Art of Feeling the Pulse” and recommended practicing in imitation of their methods. To compose the third section, “I consulted many Printed Travels.”38 He reported, for instance, that “Samedo the Portugueze commends them for their Skill,” while “Farther [sic] le Counte says, That a Chinese Emperor writ about the Pulse 4292 Years ago, since which the Chinese have been Famous for Pulses.”39 It is surprising that he does not mention one of the most widely read works on China, the book of Athanasius Kircher best known by its short title, China Illustrata (1667)—who summarizes the views of Semedo—but perhaps at the time, with the Catholic “Pretender” posing a real threat to the British government, Floyer was hiding his reliance on a Jesuit source.40 He made much more of information he drew from the 1669 English translation of Jan Nieuhof’s very influential and lavishly illustrated Dutch book on China, An Embassy from the East India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperor of China (1665).41 Nieuhof provided information on many aspects of Chinese society, including medicine. They are “very skilful in discovering by the [pulse] the inward distempters of the Body,” he explained. Practitioners “take notice of six different beatings” of the pulse in each wrist. “And therefore that they may with the greater constancy and judgment deliver their opinions, they are at least half an hour in feeling the Pulse of the Sick.” Once the pulse has revealed the illness, “then for the Curing of the Sick, they apply and make use of several Simples and Roots; to say the truth, they are generally very well experienced in the knowledge of the several Vertues of all kinds of Herbs growing amongst them.”42 While it is not clear that any of these sources explicitly state that the Chinese attentiveness to taking the pulse was directly tied to their therapeutics, Nieuhof implied it, and no doubt so did other travel writers.
In such medical examples we can begin to glimpse the more general interest in China taken by many Europeans of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians have long remarked on the popularity of Asian matters in various aspects of European life at the time, especially for their effects on food, fashion, architecture, and garden design.43 We might also include medicine, especially with the growing popularity of tea drinking. As Floyer himself suggested, “I suppose my Readers will be pleas’d to Practice according to the Chinese Mode, as well as to adorn their Houses with their curious Manufactures, and to use their Diet of Thea.”44 While the fashion for so-called Chinoiserie included influences from throughout maritime Asia, from Persia to today’s India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, China figured most heavily in European accounts of Asia. Because it was especially esteemed for its ancient textual heritage and its apparently peaceful and stable government, China became of special interest to those debating various kinds of philosophical and natural knowledge. As early as 1642 (in his Vertu des payens), François La Mothe le Vayer praised the natural religion of China as even better than that of Rome, Greece, and Egypt, and included Confucius (along with Socrates and Plato) among the virtuous pagans he refused to condemn to the fires of hell.45 He and others came to rely mainly on evidence produced for a European audience by the Jesuit mission in China begun by Matteo Ricci, in works such as Nicholas Trigault’s 1615 book on China.46 By the 1660s a growing body of work about China was becoming available in Latin and in the vernacular.47 Fragments of learned Chinese texts themselves also appeared including the Sapientia Sinica in 1662 and Sinarum scientia politico-moralis in 1667–69 (the latter was given a French translation by Melchisédec Thévenot in his Relations de divers voyages curieux in 1672).48 In 1687 access to a Latin version of the main “philosophical” sources for the learning of the mandarins became possible with the publication by the Jesuits (under the patronage of Louis XIV) of a luxurious folio edition of the “Confucian” “Four Books.” This, the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, affirmed the Jesuit view of Confucius as one of the prisci theologii, or one of the earliest teachers of God’s revealed moral, theological, and natural laws, long prior to His coming in the form of Christ.49 This edition of Confucius’s works was in turn soon translated into several vernacular European languages.50
Indeed, given the richness of the sources on the views of the Chinese literati and the verifiable antiquity of Chinese texts, many European savants came to take a keen interest in “China,” with fierce debates soon raging, in particular about the extent to which Chinese learning might represent a modern vestige of almost Adamic antiquity, about the possibility that it represented the pinnacle of knowledge gained according to natural reason, and about the goodness of the apparent philosopher’s kingdom.51 It was from having an impression of such sources (although he does not quote from them directly) that Floyer was able to spend many pages on “A Short Account of the Chinese Phylosophy” in the third part of his book. He explained that “In the beginning they say the World was produc’d out of a Universal Substance, which they call Chaos or Vacuum, and that they call Li; out of this arose an Air call’d Kie [modern qi], which by Motion, Heat and Rarification, or Cold, Rest and Condensation, produc’d five Elements. … This Phylosophy makes Matter eternal, as the Greeks; and that the World was produc’d by Chance, and govern’d by Fate; and that at first all Things were produc’d out of Matter, and are reducible into the same, so that all Things are one. … Since this Philosophy is like that of the Epicureans, our Western Philosophers do not exceed the Chinese Literati, who went as far as Reason could lead them in the Production of the World” without access to revelation.52 In explaining all this and more Floyer was repeating the general consensus that had grown up in Europe.53
Initially, Floyer’s best evidence about Chinese medicine per se came from William Wotton, surprisingly enough. Wotton had looked into the topic in order to refute Sir William Temple’s admiration for Chinese philosophy, as stated in his essay Of Heroic Virtue (1690). There Temple had repeated the view that Chinese “physicians excel in the knowledge of the pulse, and of all simple medicines,” although they went “little further; but in the first [they] are so skilful, as they pretend not only to tell by it, how many hours or days a sick man can last, but how many years a man in perfect seeming health may live, in case of no accident or violence. And by simples they pretend to relieve all diseases that nature will allow to be cured. They never let blood.”54 Wotton, however, had nothing but contempt for such opinions, and his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694) trumpeted the superiority of modern European thought. If Chinese learning was so outstanding, why were Jesuits held in high regard for teaching the emperor and other learned men astronomy and other things they should have known? But Wotton was particularly scathing about the silliness of Chinese medical theory and its methods of taking the pulse, giving long quotations from Chinese medical texts as evidence of their confusion. To do so, he quoted passages from Andreas Cleyer’s Specimen Medicinae Sinicae, sive Opuscula Medica ad Mentem Sinensium (The Pattern of Chinese Medicine, or Medical Work According to Chinese Thought) of 1682, which had printed some translations and commentaries. “It would be tedious to dwell any longer upon such Notions as these [that] every Page in Cleyer’s Book is full of,” he concluded. Clearly, Wotton considered that no truth was contained in the Chinese texts, only fancies, for “The Anatomical Figures annexed to the Tracts, which also were sent out of China, are so very whimsical, that a Man would almost believe the whole to be a Banter, if these Theories were not agreeable to the occasional Hints that may be found in the Travels of the Missionaries.”55 How could they be taken seriously?
Floyer jumped to the defense of Chinese medicine. He began when he had only the quotations from Cleyer’s Specimen that were published in Wotton’s book. Being already well disposed to the reputation of Chinese physicians for their knowledge of the pulse, Floyer ingeniously contradicted Wotton by explaining what bodily phenomena their words must have been intended to indicate. Floyer compared them to the ancients. He found “as much natural Phylosophy in their Writings, as was in Hippocrates, in Plato’s and Aristotle’s Time, and their Anatomy was not more Exact that the Chinese. In this discourse quoted from Cleyer, I find good Sense, tho’ express’d in the Asiatic way, whose Words are sorts of Hieroglyphicks, as well as their Characters; and their Expressions are fitter for Poetry and Oratory, than Phylosophy; the Asiatics have a gay luxurious Imagination, but the Europeans excel in reasoning and Judgment, and clearness of Expression.” From Wotton’s quotations, then, he extracted an interpretation of the three “high” pulses, which were related to various organs. The first, for example, described the liver, from which “the Sanguine Temper is described, and the Spirits of the Liver or Blood move the Nerves, and make a full and great pulse.”56 Then he gave a rationale for the three “low” pulses, and so on. From such a reinterpretation, he drew the conclusion that for Chinese physicians all diseases were due to a too rapid or too languid circulation of the blood, with the same for the animal spirits, and from this understanding of the pulse they had therefore developed their cures.57
He could not, however, lay his hands on a copy of the book from which Wotton had quoted, Cleyer’s Specimen Medicinae Sinicae, “till these Papers were Printing.”58 What he was searching out was the best known of the three books then available in Europe containing translations of Chinese medical texts. According to a note on the flyleaf of the copy Floyer later gave to Queen’s College, Oxford, he finally obtained it on January 16, 1703, as a gift from “the Honourable Charles Hatton,” a collector of works on the natural history of Asia, among other topics.59 Presuming the date and comment about the printing of the Pulse-Watch are correct, Floyer must have made a serious attempt to master Chinese views of the pulse, stopping the press for about three years while he attempted to make medical sense in his own terms of the material in Cleyer’s book. In the final version of his book an appendix in the form of a one-hundred-page letter to Hatton (dated January 1, 1706) reflected these efforts—an addition of comparable length to other sections of the work. Floyer’s letter summarized the treatises on the pulse contained in the Specimen that had been used by Wotton, with an English translation of some excerpts from it.60 In it, he boiled down his interpretations to six topics: “1. The Chinese Directions for feeling the Pulse. 2. The Mistakes of the Chinese in this Art. 3. The differences of the Pulse observ’d by the Chinese. 4. The Alterations of the Pulse by the Non-Naturals, and Diseases. 5. The prognostications by the Pulse. 6. The Cure of the Preternatural Pulses by simple Medicines.”61 While he had earlier attributed problems of interpretation to the “Hieroglyphick” manner of expression in Chinese and their “gay luxurious Imagination,” after working closely over Cleyer’s texts he now attributed the problem to the incomprehension of the translators. But, he concluded, “the Antiquity of this Art of feeling the Pulse … seems to be deriv’d from Noah, because the Chinese derive it from their first Kings, 2600 years before our Saviour; they have this Art by Tradition, as well as the Notion of the Circulation, because their Books give no other account of it, nor reason for it, but that they received them from their Predecessors.” “All Arts are grounded on a long Experience,” he concluded, “and the Chinese have had above 4000 Years Knowledge in this Art,” which is why they had become so skilled in it.62 Floyer continued to work on incorporating what he knew of Chinese sources into an interpretation of the pulse. In the second volume of the Pulse-Watch, published three years later, he expanded his views about how diseases are caused by problems of the circulation that can be identified by taking the pulse, concluding with his own synthesis of Greek and Chinese methods.63
In other words, one of the important innovations in European medicine of the early eighteenth century—the counting of the beats of the pulse as a diagnostic tool64—was seen by its chief advocate as a revision of a medical method that powerfully linked diagnosis and treatment, and which had previously been best practiced by the Chinese, who were representatives of the earliest natural philosophy, and so even had a knowledge of the circulation of the blood coming down almost from the beginnings of human existence.65 It was a view that Floyer had adopted from the Jesuits.
ACQUIRING KNOWLEDGE OF CHINESE MEDICINE
Floyer had been well disposed to taking a favorable view of Chinese medicine from his earlier general reading, and from his further interpretations derived from Cleyer’s work containing direct translation, the Specimen Medicinae Sinicae. Not surprisingly, both kinds of sources were heavily influenced by the interpretative program of the Society of Jesus, although other figures were also involved in the efforts to convey Chinese medicine to a European audience. For instance Cleyer’s Specimen identified its author as a German then in Batavia (now Jakarta), while indicating that many of its parts were by an “erudite European.” Nevertheless, as we shall see, the fundamental translations and commentaries originated with Jesuit missionaries in China, although they were assembled and edited by Dutch hands. The Specimen was the first and best known of two Latin works on Chinese medicine published in the seventeenth century. The other, the Clavis Medica ad Chinarum Doctrinam de Pulsibus (Medical Key to the Chinese Doctrine on the Pulse), was printed in 1686 in the series of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum (later the “Leopoldina”), a “scientific” society founded in 1652 and composed almost entirely of physicians living in the Holy Roman Empire.66 Its title page correctly identified the author as Michel Boym of the Society of Jesus, who had been a missionary in China. The work had been twenty years in the making, distancing it from Boym’s day-to-day experiences and acquisitions in China. The text was largely assembled from fragments by Cleyer with the help of the procurator of the Society of Jesus’s China mission, R. P. Philippe Couplet. A third work, Les secrets de la medecine des Chinois, Consistent en le parfaite connoissance du Pouls (1671), was not identified with the name of an author or editor, only indicating that it was sent out of China by a French person of “great merit”; but it also contained an “Avis au Lecteur” dated October 21, 1668, from one of the Jesuit missionaries then under house arrest in Canton (Guangzhou).67 In other words, knowledge of Chinese medicine in a form that could be read in Europe emerged from a program of study within the Jesuit China mission, being assisted at times by members of the VOC and the German scientific community. Much more study of these works is deserved, especially for seeing what kind of information can be found about the necessary collaborations between the Jesuits and their Chinese colleagues.68 Until such examinations are undertaken, the composition of these works and the language choices made by the translators and commentators will not be well understood. But as a starting point, they can be read in light of the outlook of the Jesuit mission and its need to persuade Europeans to support their efforts to bring China into the Christian fold. Floyer seems to have had no problem with accepting their implicit views about Chinese medicine as one aspect of Chinese natural philosophy.69
By the time the Jesuits turned their collective attention to medicine, their policy of “accommodationism,” intended to bring China into the Christian orbit, was well developed. All missionaries of course needed to know local languages in order to communicate with those they were trying to convert. In their attempts to bring East Asians into the Christian fold from the first period of Portuguese settlement in Japan and China, Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit missionaries, among others, struggled to master new and difficult languages, which were neither perfectly understood nor necessarily capable of carrying meanings transparently back and forth. Inevitably, these linguistic struggles had effects on how the Christian message was spoken and heard.70 But from the last decade of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits set themselves the additional task of mastering the canon of Chinese literature so as to make themselves equal to the learned mandarins who staffed the offices of government, which they did with the help of well-educated Chinese colleagues, often learned converts. Those efforts enabled the policy of accommodationism, which was, first, an attempt to adapt Christian teachings to the language and customs of China in order to make them unobjectionable to the literati and, second, a philosophically syncretic approach to find the essential commonalities between the various classical texts that formed the basis of the Chinese ru, or true learning, and their own Christian religion. Their engagement with Chinese learning involved them in intellectual exchanges and discussions with the literati, and even the imperial court, which in turn opened opportunities to persuade some of the highest-ranking members of the government of the truth of Christianity. At the same time, however, these efforts led both to dangerous accusations from rivals at the imperial court and to charges from within the Catholic Church that in their willingness to adapt Christian doctrine to local orientations they were altering essential tenets of the true faith. At the end of the seventeenth century this “rites” controversy would cause a break with the emperor of China and threaten the very existence of the order.71
In the meantime, the philosophical orientation of accommodationism can be noted in the Jesuits’ reliance on both Thomistic views of natural reason and widespread assumptions at the time of a prisca theologia.72 They took the general view that the Chinese lacked only God’s revelations and the teaching of Christ and his apostles to see the full truth of things. (Floyer echoed this sentiment in his comment that Chinese literati “went as far as Reason could lead them in the Production of the World, ’tis only Revelation, which can discover the true Philosophy of the Creation, and the Nature of the God who made all Things,” that was superior.)73 The Jesuits identified the ancient teacher of the true natural philosophy as a figure from the beginning of Chinese history, Kongzi, whose name they Latinized as “Confutius” or Confucius, arguing that all the other texts, authors, and commentators took their principles from his original insights, just as in Europe it was argued that the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, sometimes identified with Moses, had been the first lawgiver, philosopher, and priest, from whom all learning had descended. As the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher would put it, “The most ancient and indigenous Chinese sect is the literati, which rules this kingdom, has many books, and is more praised than the others. They acknowledge Confucius as the author or chief of philosophers, just as the Egyptians do Thoyt [Thoth], whom the Greeks call Hermes Trismegistos.”74 The Jesuits also applied their philological expertise to Chinese literary history, making persuasive arguments about how missing texts could be reconstructed and others re-edited to bring out the essential meaning of ru, shaping what was arguably a multitudinous textual tradition into a single harmonious system. In other words, the Jesuits assembled a kind of “Confucian monotheism,” which they tried to enrich by adding Christian teaching to it.75
The Jesuit mission was in turn deliberative in their conveyance of European learning into Chinese.76 Because of their mastery of both European mathematical sciences and classical Chinese, they famously managed to gain a place in the office that annually established the calendar, which was fundamental to the sacerdotal functions of the emperor, and which provided a framework of hope for conversion at the very top. But while the Jesuits are understandably best known for their work in astronomy and mathematics, they also took an interest in medicine.77 For instance, Johann Schreck, known as Terrentius, who joined the Jesuit order in 1611 and soon the China mission, had studied medicine in Paris, Montpellier, Bologna, and Rome, and had been a member of the Italian scientific academy, the Lincei, for whom he worked on an edition of the natural history of New Spain. While in China he began to gather a botanical compilation of over five hundred plants previously unknown in Europe and, working in Hangzhou with Li Chih Tsao, composed a work in Chinese on human anatomy inspired by his friend, Caspar Bauhin.78
While efforts to translate their own knowledge into Chinese occupied the Jesuits almost from the first, they began to publish Chinese works in Latin only in the later seventeenth century.79 In this effort, medical knowledge played a large part. Michel Boym (who appeared on the Clavis’s title page) took a lead in this effort, although his efforts were bound up with a tragic story. Originally from Lwów, he shipped out to the Far East in 1642 on Portuguese trading routs, stopping at Mozambique on the way, and, after mastering spoken and written Chinese in Macao, was the chief Jesuit envoy for Tongkin and Hainan, in the south.80 The region destined him for a difficult road. When the Manchus took over Beijing in 1644, establishing the Qing (or Ch’ing) dynasty, the remnants of the Ming government (including several high-ranking Christian converts), persisted in the southern Chinese provinces, and even reconquered Canton and other areas in 1648. Boym was asked to carry letters to Rome asking for assistance, effectively serving as an ambassador from the Ming court to the pope. Shortly after Boym and two converts set out for Rome in late 1650, however, the Qing recaptured Canton and soon drove the last of the Ming forces into the southwest, making an ambassador from the old regime unwelcome to Portuguese officials in Asia. Finding his way frequently obstructed, it took Boym’s group two years of travel by sea and land to get to the Levant, from where Boym continued on to Venice, from where he slipped into Rome with Venetian and French help. He spent 1652 to 1655 cooling his heels while various officials and councils considered how the pope should respond to the letters he delivered. His return journey proved no smoother. Boym set out in 1656 for Lisbon and then Goa along with several young recruits to the Jesuit mission who would later also engage in translations—especially Philip Couplet and Prospero Intorcetta—then, because of a Dutch blockade, the party proceeded overland for the Bay of Bengal, and on to Siam (which he reached at the beginning of 1658). Since he carried letters for the Ming and so remained unwelcome by Portuguese officials, it took him some months further to find a ship to Tonkin, from where he at last found a way to travel to the Ming court in southwest China. He found the passes of Guangxi blocked by Manchus, however, and while trying to find a way around, he fell ill and died, in August 1659.
But while working in the southern Chinese provinces in the 1640s, Boym had also occupied himself with acquiring a knowledge of Chinese natural history and medicine. When in Rome he and his Chinese companion, Andreas Zheng, were instrumental in helping the famous Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher to acquire information about east Asia, which later resulted in a remarkable book known as Kircher’s China Illustrata (1667). It included a section on the discovery of a Christian Nestorian monument from the eighth century CE in “Hsi-an Fu” (modern Xian or Xi’an), which was brought to the attention of the Jesuits in the 1620s: it was this early Christian connection that first motivated Kircher’s study of China.81 One of the authors cited by Floyer, Father Semedo, was the first to see and describe the stele, and he was quoted by Kircher, but Boym and Zheng brought Kircher a more detailed description of the monument, and possibly the rubbing of the Syriac and Chinese texts on it that was later displayed in Kircher’s museum.82 Boym and Zheng worked up a transcription of the Chinese text in numbered columns, providing a Romanization and translation of it in word-for-word order, as well as a more fluent interpretation, which Kircher published in his book and which in the imagination of many European scholars became a kind of Rosetta Stone, the “clavis Sinica” to unlock the meanings contained in Chinese characters.83
But while in Rome Boym also completed a work of his own on the natural history of China, the Flora Sinensis (1656), and was working on several other projects, including one on medicine.84 In 1654, he published an account of his embassy, to which he attached an appendix outlining seven studies he was readying for the press, including the Flora Sinensis.85 The maps of China and the Latin account of the China mission that he promised have been identified, the latter of which included his opinion that the Chinese could not only diagnose but predict the course of a disease according to the pulse and that they also had many herbs and herbal medicines unknown to Europeans.86 He also had in hand an account of the moral philosophy of the Chinese (Moralis Philosophia Sinarum), which was most likely a version of the work later published in 1662 as Sapientia Sinica (with Ignatius da Costa and Prospero Intorcetta named as editors) and modified in 1667 as Sinarum scientia politico-moralis (with Intorcetta as editor). Perhaps not surprisingly for the son of a physician, he was also preparing a work on Chinese medicine with special attention to their ability not only to diagnose disease but to treat by touching the pulse—the program that had excited Floyer’s imagination.87 Like the work on moral philosophy, however, Boym took it along with him for further study and consultation when he returned to China. On that journey he was accompanied by a new recruit, Intorcetta, who, after Boym’s death, became the editor of one of the projects; another of his companions on the return journey, Phillippe Couplet, would be named as an editor of Boym’s book on the pulse. Both works no doubt underwent further work by members of the China mission after Boym’s death before they were finally ready for the press.
The story of how two medical works originating with Boym returned to Europe is also full of incident.88 The first, the Clavis, was actually published second. On their separate travels from Goa to China, Couplet and Boym met briefly in Siam during 1658, during which time another one of the young missionaries, Ignatius Hartogvelt, died; via the Dutch VOC, Couplet sent some of Hartogvelt’s things back home, and at the same time, he also included some of Boym’s materials on Chinese pulse methods in the package directed to VOC officials in Batavia. According to a letter of 1687 from Couplet, Boym intended them to be published, but because the VOC blamed the Jesuits for their failure to secure trading rights in China, they were not sent on to Europe.89 They ended up in the hands of the VOC’s chief medical officer, Cleyer. But then from the end of 1681 to early 1683 Couplet himself stopped in Batavia on his return to Europe (as procurator to gather renewed support for the mission), and spent time with Cleyer; he apparently came across Boym’s papers again. With Cleyer’s support—the latter was by then a member of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, which printed them—they appeared in 1686 as the Clavis. That book contained three letters about Chinese medicine from Boym, dated Siam, 1658, two other prefaces (probably also by Boym), a seventeen-chapter treatise on the pulse in Chinese medicine, and six woodcut illustrations.90 There seems no reason to doubt that, as the title page says, this latter work is Boym’s work as collected by Cleyer and revised by Couplet.
But the Specimen, which Floyer and many others drew on, had an even more tangled origin. Boym was, of course, not the only Jesuit to take an interest in Chinese medicine. Couplet’s own “passion” to translate a Chinese medical work into Latin was noted in a contemporary Portuguese account referring to 1659 or 1661. Moreover, when Couplet or his colleague, François de Rougemont, fell ill, they entrusted themselves to Chinese physicians, two of whom were mentioned by name: Vam C*u lai (modern Wang Tzu-lai) and Cham Chun poi.91 From 1665 to 1671, when all the Jesuit missionaries spent a period together under house arrest in Canton, and could not proselytize, they conducted further work translating and commenting on classic works. For instance, the massive translation of four Confucian works that Couplet later published in Europe, the Confucius Sinarum Philosophus of 1687, was completed during the period in Canton.92 Apparently Les Secrets de la Medicine was also polished for publication shortly before October 1668, when its preface was composed.
At the same time, a working relationship between the Jesuits and the VOC had been established. Cleyer and Couplet may have met in 1662, when a VOC delegation was in China to seek trading privileges and Couplet assisted it; we know that in 1666 a letter from Couplet singled out Cleyer as one of his “special friends.” Cleyer had by then started to engage in medical practice in Batavia, and within a couple of years had become the senior medical officer in the East Indies, organizing an effort to obtain effective local medicines from places throughout Asia. When another VOC delegation was in Canton from September 1668 to March 1669, Cleyer received yet further messages from Couplet, and responded warmly. (It may be this route by which Les Secrets de la Medicine was conveyed to Europe.) Cleyer received a Chinese herbarium from the Jesuits, while he in turn sent them newspapers and medicines, and 300 gilders—they were greatly in need of money—along with a request to send him more medical works from China, asking in particular for “the translation of a work dealing with Chinese ‘pulse-method,’ if possible with illustrations.”93 The relationship between Couplet and Cleyer developed into a regular “Holland-connection” that allowed the Jesuits to send packages of their letters to Cleyer, who posted them on to Amsterdam, from where they would be sent to their local destinations in Europe, often via Antwerp.94 It is almost certain, then, that the four letters published in Cleyer’s Specimen from an anonymous “erudit” sent to Cleyer from Canton and dated February 12 and October 20, 1669, and November 5 and 15, 1670, which concern pulse diagnosis and the circulation, and are followed by nine diagrams and tables, are from Couplet. In Batavia, Cleyer collected further manuscripts and illustrations and in 1676 apparently sent an early version of what became the Specimen to Amsterdam for publication, although a more complete version, or a more complete version of one of the Chinese texts intended for it, followed in 1681.95
But it may well have been the presence of the physician Willem ten Rhijne, whom we met at the beginning of this essay, who urged Cleyer to think of publishing the works he was collecting, just as ten Rhijne stimulated a Batavian clergyman to publish a book on a local treatment for gout, moxibustion.96 Ten Rhijne resided at Deshima, the Dutch station in Nagasaki, for two years, where, as we saw, he immersed himself in an effort to translate a Chinese medical text into Dutch and Latin via Japanese intermediaries.97 After his hopes of becoming a physician to the Shogun were dashed, ten Rhijne returned to Batavia in 1676 without further instructions. While the government of the VOC was slowly making up its mind how to make use of him, he made good use of his time by writing a number of treatises about his medical experiences. These included the first long tract in a European language on acupuncture and moxibustion, which in turn included the remarks on Chinese medicine he had gleaned from his Japanese colleagues and four charts of the acupuncture points. At the same time, he also assisted Hendrik van Reede with the editing of his huge and impressive work on the botany of the Malabar coast.98 He also agreed to help Cleyer sort and edit the texts that went into the Specimen; perhaps he had even initiated this by persuading Cleyer to think of publishing what he had been collecting. The two later had a falling out, but if a letter from Cleyer is correct, a version of the Specimen was sent to Amsterdam in 1676 intended for publication;99 if we can trust ten Rhijne, further supplementary material was sent to Europe for publication in 1681.100
The Specimen, which finally appeared in 1682, is therefore, and self-evidently, a compilation of various kinds of texts, translations, tables, and illustrations, assembled in Batavia. Because it was made up of several different, independently paginated sections, copies I have examined have the contents bound in different order, some missing sections present in others. The copy used by Floyer has all the parts found in any other copy, and ordered similarly to the manuscript meant for the printer, so we will take that as our example.101 Following the title page, a dedication by Cleyer to the governors of the VOC, and a Latin poem in praise of Cleyer’s achievement, the first main text was a fifty-four page translation of a four-part treatise on the different pulses and their indications, mainly taken from “Vám Xó Hó.” This is probably, in modern Romanization of the name, Wang Chou Houo, the third-century CE author of the Mo Tsing, or “Treatise of the Pulses,” which describes and graphically depicts the twenty-eight forms of the pulse.102 A few of its parts are said in the titles “not” to be from “Hoâm tý,” or Huangdi, the famous Yellow Emperor of classical Chinese medicine. Whether the Jesuits were working from a medical compilation of their own time, or one they put together with advice, or whether the final version of the text was assembled by ten Rhijne after his consultations in Japan, this section was stitched together from at least two very early textual sources. A second section of 108 consecutive pages was titled “Treatise on the Pulse as Collected by an Erudite European.” This also contained various parts, opening with a treatise on the pulse said to be taken from an ancient work on medical philosophy, “Nuy kim,” probably the Nei Jing (or Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi) of the second century CE. (Kajdański believed that this material must also have come from Boym, but it could as well have come from ten Rhijne or Couplet, or other learned Europeans.)103 Other parts in this section include chapters 17 through 21 of a work on East Asian medicine written by an erudite European; excerpts from anonymous letters dated February 2, 1669, October 20, 1669, November 5, 1670, and November 15, 1670 (no doubt letters from Couplet to Cleyer); charts and tables assembling information about what feeling the pulses could explain; and anatomical tables showing channels and points on the body for acupuncture and moxibustion. A third section on treatment, in fifty-four consecutive pages, again from Wang Chou Houo, gives recipes to counteract various problems identified from the seven exterior pulses and the eight interior pulses, followed by a list and brief description of 289 simples (perhaps the “herbarium” sent to Cleyer in 1668–69). The fourth and final section consists of a treatise on tongue diagnosis (with diagrammatic illustrations) in sixteen pages. Three final remarks indicate that much of the information came from a learned Christian convert who was also a doctor.104 At the end, twenty-six woodcut illustrations pertaining to the previous materials are attached.
In other words, the Specimen was an assemblage of various Chinese medical treatises translated into Latin, mainly but not exclusively devoted to the pulse, together with several learned commentaries on them, and recommendations for treatment, along with lists of medicines, summary tables, diagrams, and illustrations. Its publishing history shows that it was not under the editorial control of the Jesuits, but of a more eclectic VOC physician in Batavia with input from various other people, probably with the intention of collecting something like “information” about Chinese medicine, especially the methods of diagnosis by pulse and tongue, and of treatment. At the same time, however, in the commentaries of those Europeans who understood Chinese, and even in the Latin words chosen for translation—such as humidum radicale for yin, calidum innatum or calorem primigenium for yang, chaos seu materiam incompositam for kie (qi), or spirituum os for ki keu—the editors and translators drew on Latin terms derived from medieval and classical sources rather than the post-Cartesian medicine of their contemporaries.105 In other words, despite the fragmentation of the work, it gave many of its readers the impression that Chinese medicine was a unified whole, of great antiquity, and in keeping with a universal and holistic natural philosophy originating with the prisci philosophi and therefore containing extraordinary hints of the first principles behind health and disease—a mythology about Chinese medicine that persists to this day.106
For Floyer, the excitement of reading a work like the Specimen was that it confirmed in him something to which he was already committed: making the pulse a fundamental part of medicine, not only for diagnosis but for treatment. In “Chinese medicine” as read through the lens of the Specimen, he saw sources of ancient wisdom that could be clarified and improved by the application of modern mechanical principles. In building on a solid philosophy confirmed by thousands of years of experience, Floyer could see himself bringing a timeless universal method to the attention of all humankind. In that sense, he did not have to understand the classical texts of Chinese medicine perfectly. As a matter of fact, the passages from the Specimen that Wotton had attacked in print, and which Floyer chose to translate and reinterpret in a favorable light, were actually not from a distant Chinese medical philosopher at all, but can instead be matched up with pages 85 to 87 of the second part of the Specimen, which happens to be an excerpt of a letter dated November 5, 1670, probably from Couplet to Cleyer.107 The substance of the debate between Wotton and Floyer was therefore not about an ancient text but about how a Jesuit had summarized a portion of what he considered to be a canon.
At first glance, then, it would appear that Floyer worked away without an authentic understanding of what Chinese practitioners did and wrote, relying on representations of exotic knowledge and practice. The terms of the debate were set by more than one interpretation of and commentary on Chinese texts; these in turn were framed by various parties with deep interests in European debates about the foundations of knowledge—including but not limited to medicine—who recruited appropriate representations of Chinese knowledge to strengthen their cases. In these terms, it matters little whether the Jesuits chose medical texts that were “representative” of Chinese medicine as practiced in their day or in antiquity (although to their credit they touched many of the same sources as modern historians of medicine). Nor does it matter whether they translated and summarized the originals in ways that we would consider accurate according to our own standards (although it must be noted that making such translations remains very difficult). What the Jesuits were doing was transmitting a view of Chinese medicine that was in keeping with the themes of their accommodationist policy; their words were reassembled and edited in turn in Dutch-speaking Batavia; and when the fragmented results were published in Germany, some of the European audience sought syncretic views that would allow the construction of universal knowledge systems, while others wished to build on other foundations, making “Chinese medicine” a point of controversy.
And yet, Floyer’s interest in finding out about Chinese pulse methods was not simply to confirm what he already thought. Kuriyama is no doubt correct to show that taking the pulse and feeling the mo are incommensurable activities. Yet many people labored for decades—as they still do—to bridge the differences, at least in part because they hoped to glimpse worlds that had not been visible before, or not as clearly. It might therefore be significant that the most debated and quoted work was the Specimen rather than the Clavis, probably because in the former Cleyer was attempting to transmit information about methods and practices as well as explanations, while in the latter Boym was giving a more formal exposition of medical philosophy. Floyer’s excitement, for instance, was in the “real” effects that could be elicited from practitioners touching patients.108 It was the imaginary contact with bodily practice invoked by the words that excited him and on which his own interpretations could be constructed.
In other words, Floyer’s enthusiasm was generated not by the interpretative medical philosophy of East Asia per se but by a vision of Chinese practitioners touching something in other bodies that could be articulated and shared: they were literally putting their fingers on the beating heart of life using methods that others could not only learn from but improve upon. Floyer did not necessarily want to imitate their practices, but he did want to note the real effects drawn from them and to draw lessons for his own practice. His hopes for healthful change in his patients, emergent from counting the beats of the pulse, not self-enlightenment, moved him. The Jesuits may have begun their project in hope of a universal human conversation with shared truth as the foundation; Floyer thought he could build on that by finding a universal practice in a simplified method of noting physical (“mechanical”) realities. Floyer’s response to Chinese medicine may have been based on misunderstandings, but it was profoundly creative. It was so because he was not content with the representations alone: he struggled to find the sources of authentic physical truths in the bodies he touched.
What moved relatively easily between China and Europe, then, were tangible things. Lists of medicines, rules of practice, and indications of how to touch all dealt with objects or the related “objective” aspects of people and the rest of nature. What moved less easily were the assumptions and expectations that were expressed in words alone, the things we often refer to as theories or concepts. In that sense, global history is helpful for understanding only a part of the historical connections between people. Modeled on economic history, it is very good at conveying the ways in which people interacted with one another when dealing with material objects and the words associated with those things and their properties, and with processes of production, accumulation, and exchange. We might say that the more materialistic the practice, the more easily it moved—which may well be why certain kinds of knowledge practice, now called science, are relatively easily shared. Other kinds of knowledge are less easily moved. Some parts of even the largest incommensurable lumps, however, moved from one “civilization” or another. The bridges of understanding between distant ways of life and language might be shaky, incapable of conveying all the weight placed upon them and prone to collapse. But imperfect as they may be, even figures like Floyer were grateful for their existence and risked ridicule by traveling across them from time to time. As many of his contemporaries argued, it was from sociability and attention to the real that any hope of human flourishing might emerge from an imperfect world. Communication takes shape not from words and gestures alone, but from touch as well.