Translating Medicine in the Premodern World

Abstracts

• 
  Translating Techniques of Alchemy and Surgery between Europe and Southeast Asia

  Tara Alberts, University of York

  René Charbonneau (1643–72) traveled to Siam (modern-day Thailand) in 1676 as a lay auxiliary to a band of French missionary priests. He had trained as a surgeon and was soon called upon to practice his profession in the service of the mission, treating both missionaries and the indigent poor in mission hospitals. A close examination of the few letters that survive in his hand reveal fascinating insights into some of the most common surgical procedures he performed in Siam, many of which would have been very familiar to his surgeon colleagues in seventeenth-century France: bleeding, treating wounds, administering clysters. However, other details also emerge which suggest how far surgeons like Charbonneau were able to adapt their role in these new environments, how they were able to experiment with new techniques and cures, and how they were often required to reconceptualize their techniques and technologies for new audiences. Although he was not trained as an alchemist or a physician, we see Charbonneau attempting to fabricate alchemical cures, and to serve a wide range of medical functions, which would not have been open to him as a surgeon in France.  His letters provide a rare insight into how a reader of newly vernacularized scientific and medical texts attempted (often with limited success) to translate the knowledge they contained into practical action.

  

  Phra Narai on his Elephant, from Guy Tachard, Voyage des pères Jesuites, envoyés par le roy, aux Indes & à la Chine. Avec leurs observations astronomiques, & leurs remarques de physique, de géographie, d’hydrographie, & d’histoire (Paris, 1686). Image: Wikimedia Commons.

  Focusing on two spheres of knowledge—alchemy and surgery—which have particular resonances and connotations in the history of medical translation between Europe and Asia, this essay explores translation and contextualization as attempted by non-experts in the royal court and cosmopolitan port cities of seventeenth-century Siam. I examine the experiences of a number of lay surgeons and medical practitioners like Charbonneau who translated and transformed their practices to suit the perceived needs of patients. I contextualize European techniques of surgery and alchemy against local Siamese practices and understandings, to consider how the encounter shaped and transformed the meaning and experience of these medical interventions. I thereby illuminate the realities of translation “in the field,” and uncover the practical strategies employed by patients and healers for the translation of theoretical knowledge into practice.

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  Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: Tropical Phantasms and Technologies of Tobacco
  

  Benjamin Breen, UC Santa Cruz

  By now, historians are familiar with the paradoxical history of tobacco, which figured in early modern Europe as both a potentially miraculous cure and a fearsome conduit for “heathen” or demonic influence. Tracing the movement of materials, technologies, and theories related to its ingestion around the early modern world allows us to address the instability of meanings as objects and substances are translated across linguistic and cultural boundaries and between other spheres of human experience. This paper frames the history of tobacco within a larger theme: the epistemic role of technologies that converted solids into smoke. Fascination with the transformations of fire can be seen in both the writings of groups like the Royal Society of London, and in less-studied observations of vapor and smoke conducted by both European and non-European actors in the seventeenth-century tropics. The transformation of a physical substance into smoke was a process of disarticulation—a loss of material coherence. But it was also (potentially) capable of producing new knowledge, as it translated physical matter into an immaterial essence whose psychoactive nature was perceived directly by the mind itself. Attempts to understand how the psychoactive “virtues” of a plant could survive when consumed as smoke thus served as a point of connection between early modern theories of mind, chemical medicine, and the patterns of European colonization that had led to the globalization of smoking technologies in the first place. 

  At the center of it all was a familiar but surprisingly mysterious object: the pipe. Because tobacco smoking reached sixteenth-century Europe via the New World, it is sometimes assumed that the technology of the pipe did too. However, there is strong archaeological evidence that pipes from sub-Saharan African pre-date the globalization of tobacco during the Columbian Exchange. This paper surveys evidence for the existence of smoking technologies in sub-Saharan Africa both prior to and during the Columbian Exchange (which were used not for tobacco, but for Old World natives like Cannabis indica and dagga, or Leonotis leonorus) and explores its implications for the history of early modern science. This alternative origin story for smoking was, perhaps, partially forgotten because European natural philosophers regarded these combustibles as less scientifically useful than New World tobacco. The result was a complex set of translations: between substance and smoke; between sacramental object and mass-produced technology; and between the realm of medicine and that of intoxication.    

   

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  Female Authority in Translation: Medieval Catalan Texts on Women’s Health

  Montserrat Cabré, Universidad de Cantabria

  During the last three decades two different research programs have contributed to changing the way we approach medieval medicine in the Latin West. On the one hand, thanks to the work of Monica Green on the texts that gave birth to the Trotula tradition—which strongly influenced medieval culture—we have a broad and precise landscape of how medicine dealt with the practical management of the female body. On the other, the so-called “vernacularization of medicine” in the late Middle Ages has been thoroughly studied for a variety of linguistic traditions. This has led to an understanding in the scholarship about the Latin healthcare corpus about how it developed from Salernitan medicine and the university medical centers of Western Europe; and how it was transformed by practices of translation that appropriated and adapted knowledge about the body for different audiences, professional and lay.

   

  

  Trotula as magistra teaching on women’s nature. Source: Placides et Timeo, Rennes, Bibliothèque de Rennes —Les Champs Libres, Ms. 593, fol. 532r.  License: CCBY-NC 3.0

  http://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/consult/consult.php?VUE_ID=1120907

  This contribution is situated at the crossroads of these research approaches, as it investigates the impact of translation practices on the construction of female authority in one particular vernacular language. My approach traces how late medieval Catalan medicine created its own notion of female medical authority by acknowledging, adapting, and erasing Latin ideas while translators, adaptors, and compilers were working to bring medical literature over to new audiences. Through a focused case-study, it analyzes the broad cultural processes of mediation from a hitherto unexplored gendered perspective.

  The Catalan corpus of medical texts is a relevant instance as it belongs to a particularly rich and geographically widespread linguistic tradition in the late Middle Ages. With the determined political concourse of the Aragonese crown, Catalan became a medical language from the late thirteenth century on, and the ongoing project Sciencia.cat provides a detailed body of evidence for both extant and missing texts allowing for a solid reconstruction of the healthcare corpus. The Catalan corpus of medical texts belongs to a particularly rich and geographically widespread linguistic tradition in the late middle ages. Examples can be found as early as 1305, reflecting the activities of lay women and men and emerging groups of health practitioners in commissioning, producing and consuming vernacular texts. This essay explores fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Catalan medical texts, focusing in particular on a mid-fifteenth century translation of the De curis mulierum that I have recently identified in an anonymous surgeon’s handbook.

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  Reconstructing the Medical Canon: Seventeenth-Century English Physicians and Their Notebooks

  Sietske Fransen, University of Cambridge

  Learning practices in early modern Europe were mainly textual, based on a well-established canon of knowledge. Books were the main sources for acquiring knowledge, and teaching and learning methods depended heavily on the processing of the written word. Teachers lectured, and students took notes. Students read books, and students annotated their books, and extracted notes and passages into their notebooks. And some new teaching methodologies, such as the method of Petrus Ramus, developed in the sixteenth century, promoted the use of tables for the support of logical thinking.

  

  “Inflammatio collumella.” A medical diagram by Daniel Foote, in the British Library, MS Sloane 590, f. 91r.

  Based on two collections of personal notebooks, this essay will investigate the role of translation in the re-creation and reconstruction of a medical canon in seventeenth-century England. One of the results of the so-called “scientific revolution” on the traditional medical corpus was that traditional classical medicine was re-framed and interspersed with vernacular, practical, and local medical knowledge. The vicar and medical practitioner John Ward (1629–1681), an Oxford man, left seventeen volumes of “diaries” in which he recorded what he read, with whom he spoke or corresponded, and in which he noted down medical practices and recipes that could become useful in his time as a “medical vicar” in Stratford. A contemporary of his, an ejected vicar and physician Daniel Foote (1629–1700), had trained in Cambridge. Foote left more than thirty-five volumes of notebooks, giving an insight into his university education and his many different interests and occupations after his ejection as a clerical man. The Ward volumes, which have been described before, will form the context in which Daniel Foote’s collection will be analyzed. The latter’s notebooks contain many extractions from canonical texts, they contain translations from Latin, German, Dutch, and French lesser-known texts into English. And they also contain books of tables, summarizing and visualizing medical information into manageable portions.

  By comparing the note-taking practices of these two medical practitioners, this essay will show how health and the human body were central to their curiosity and investigations. What is more, this essay will make clear how translation of texts and practices from a variety of sources was essential in building a new medical canon.

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  Translating Health Practices in the Early Modern Caribbean

  Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  This essay studies the translation of health practices in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Sickness and death dominated everyday life in the early modern Caribbean and famously modeled its social, ethnic, cultural, military, and political landscapes. Using under-utilized sources for the history of medicine and science, this essay examines a number of aspects that have been left outside of accounts examining the production and translation of knowledge about the body in the early modern Atlantic. Prominent among them is the fact that in south Atlantic spaces like the Caribbean everyday transactions around bodily suffering and alleviation ensued through linguistic, epistemological and corporeal avenues do not fit within most existent historical narratives about medical translation—which revolve European languages, institutions, and socio-cultural mores.

   

  

  “Yerva de amor/Yerva de la Verdad”, Bernardo de Cienfuegos, Historia de las plantas, [ca. 1627-1631]. Manuscript at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain.

  [A plant with numerous wondrous effects that practitioners of African descent used for their cosmopolitan clientele in seventeenth-century Cuba. Spanish natural historians classified the plant as “Catance Primera de Diocorides-Yerva silvestre de Dodoneo.”]

  The case studies examined in this essay show that processes of translation of disease and health-related matters in seventeenth-century Caribbean spaces revolved mostly around African-originated languages and bodily practices. These processes of translation—between African languages, and between African languages and Amerindian and European ones (including Portuguese and Spanish Pidgin languages that were the lingua franca of the South Atlantic during the seventeenth century) were at the center of bodily transactions of all sorts in the region. In the early modern Caribbean, the movements of health and disease related ideas, terms, and practices between different cultures, and the ruptures in the transmission of knowledge common to all kinds of translations, happened through linguistic and performative conduits outside of recognisable Western historicist models—usually focused on the dynamics of European colonial and imperial circulation (or obscuring) of so-called “indigenous” knowledge in the early modern era. The history of translation about corporeal matters in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, I argue in this essay, highlights the types of epistemic violence that existing historicist models impose on the examination of histories of knowledge making about the natural world in non-Euro-American spaces. The history of the translation of corporeal practices in the early modern Caribbean forces a re-imagination of dynamics of translation that historians of science and medicine have previously described in terms of circumscribed groupings, Western epistemological frameworks, fragmentation, and cultural and social cacophony.

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  The Urge to Gloss: Multilingualism in the Making of Ṭibb

  Shireen Hamza, Harvard University

  Manuscripts of medical texts composed in medieval and early modern South Asia frequently included glossaries (“farhang”) of technical terminology. These were structured around entries for disease categories in Arabic, with translations in Persian and "hindī" (vernacular South Asian languages). Medical glossaries, titled “farhang-i ṭibb,” or less commonly “lughat-i ṭibb," were part of a broader literary practice of producing farhangs in Persian literature. Glossaries were composed to accompany a variety of texts, from the Quran to epics of poetry. The medical glossaries were iteratively produced through reading, citation, medical practice and writing. Translation in these glossaries is not the “transfer” of knowledge from one language to another. Rather, it acknowledges the continued use of multiple languages, and enables readers with different kinds of linguistic skills.

  

  i

  I focus on the glossaries accompanying a Persian medical text, the Shifā-yi Maraḍ, often called the Ṭibb-i Shihābī after its author, Shihāb al-Dīn Nagawrī. Nagawrī lived on the west coast of India and, in 1392 CE, dedicated this text to the governor of Gujarat. This is one of the earliest Persian medical texts to have been composed in South Asia. It was used in the following centuries by physicians in the region, as attested to by its many extant copies bearing marginal notations. The glossaries accompanying the text, usually titled Farhang-i Ṭibb-i Shihābī, are unique in each manuscript, likely added by later scribes or physicians. Entries of Arabic or Greek words include Persian translations and sometimes “hindavī” words, referring to the vernacular language in use at the time. These mirror the “hindī/hindavī” translations of illness names and materia medica found within the body of the text itself.

  Contextualizing these glossaries within a larger body of texts produced in South Asia and Yemen, I investigate the iterative and collaborative process through which these glossaries were produced -- and their role in the formation of the medical tradition known as "ṭibb." Modern scholarship on ṭibb, called Graeco-Arabic or Islamic medicine, has focused on texts composed in Arabic in the Near East. However, this focus neglects the life of ṭibb around the Indian Ocean World, where it underwent some of its most lasting developments. By analyzing the profusion of multilingual glossaries from the western Indian Ocean World, I aim to understand ṭibb across a fuller geography, in which physicians worked continuously across linguistic regimes to pursue efficacious knowledge.

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  “Use Me as Your Test!”: The Problem of Patient-Practitioner Ethics in Dutch-Japanese Surgical Translation

  Hansun Hsiung, MPIWG

  To cut deeply into a patient’s body, opening her living flesh, posed a problem for medical deontology in premodern East Asia. According to this deontology, the patient-practitioner relationship was defined by the Confucian virtue of “humaneness” (Chinese: ren; Japenese: jin), made concrete by a normative preference for non-invasive cures. How, then, did Japanese physicians reconcile this “humaneness” with their growing interest, at the end of the eighteenth century, in invasive European surgical techniques? What moral grounds had to be invented, such that procedures foreign, untested, and often radically violent, might be tested on patients? This essay answers these questions by rescuing the tale of Kan (1743–1804), a female commoner from the village of Gojō, Japan, and her physician, Hanaoka Seishū (1760–1835). Inspired by Lorenz Heister’s Chirurgie (1st ed. 1718/9), Hanaoka attempted to surgically remove a cancerous tumor from Kan’s breast in 1803, marking the first reliably documented operation of its kind in East Asia. Although unsuccessful—Kan died shortly thereafter—the episode nonetheless came to be widely celebrated by the Japanese medical community, with narrative accounts and portraits of Kan circulating well into the mid-nineteenth century.

  

  The mother of Rihei, dyer from the village of Gojō, in the county of Uchi, Yamato Province (present-day Nara, Japan), at age 60. Source: Kishitsu geryō zukan, ca. 1825, National Library of Medicine.

  Examining these verbal and visual sources, this essay argues that the episode’s celebrated status, despite the operation’s apparent failure, lay in Hanaoka’s ability to outline a new reasoning by which the testing of untested foreign techniques could be construed as “humane.” Specifically, Hanaoka crafted a new ideal of the patient—a patient whose bravery and willingness to act as a test subject offered moral legitimation to the practitioner. This thesis has broad implications both for understanding the translation of European medicine in East Asia, and for the social history of medicine at large. While scholarship on the translation of European medicine in East Asia has focused on epistemic shifts—shifts in the practices through which bodies and diseases were known, and in the criteria by which these practices where labelled “empirical”—I argue that translation also served as an arena for the negotiation of ethical relations, reconfiguring patient-practitioner roles and boundaries of the permissible and impermissible. Such an understanding of translation, in turn, suggests a need to explore how cross-cultural translation has constructed the social history of medicine’s much vaunted “patient” as a subject position. Moreover, it suggests that within the cross-cultural translation of surgical knowledge may lie the prehistory of a proto-category of “consent,” as physicians sought moral legitimation for testing foreign techniques.

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  Translating, Printing, and Reading "The Art of Distillation"
  

  Elaine Leong, MPIWG and University College London

  In 1651, John French (1616–1657) offered the English reading public a new handbook: The Art of Distillation. The work represents the fruits of French’s wide-ranging reading and translating practices and includes large sections (with images) extracted from Johann Rudolph Glauber’s (1604–1670) Furni novi philosophici, a series of five German tracts on distilling published in Amsterdam in the 1640s. In the mid-1730s, the Devon-based Tallamy family obtained a copy of The Art of Distillation. Lead by Rebecca Tallamy, they wrote a cornucopia of annotations into their treasured copy of French’s book, including hundreds of additional recipes and personalized selections from other contemporary medical books including the works of Nicholas Culpeper and William Salmon. Running out of space in the margins, the family bound another 140 blank leaves to the book, allowing them to further expand their collection of medical and culinary know-how. The printed medical book, then, is at once a conduit and a receptacle for medical knowledge—a personal archive of medical knowledge strategically assembled to suit the needs of the family. 

  

  Title page from John French, The Art of Distillation (1651) with eighteenth-century annotations of the Tallamy family. Image: Courtesy of the Wellcome Library.

  Taking this curious volume as a starting point, this essay explores translation, print, and medical reading in early modern England, placing emphasis on practices of extraction and archivization. By exploring the complex materiality and intertextuality of translated texts, this essay offers a fresh perspective on how we might understand the ways in which readers interacted with, used, and translated again the information contained within. Translation becomes an ongoing, collective, and collaborative project which moves far outside the bounds of the source text and the translated text has become a much more complex object, embedded within practices and local contexts, taking meaning both from its creators and its users. In viewing the Tallamy’s activities within analytical frameworks developed by historians of archives such as Kathryn Burns, I further emphasize how processes of translation, reading, and note-taking were all deliberately employed to create an eighteenth-century home-based archive of health.

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  Translating the “Materio-Spiritual” Body: Hylozoic Medicine in Colonial India

  Projit Bihari Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania

  In 1891 Dr. Brajanath Shaha, a successful Bengali practitioner of “Western” medicine, published a curious Bengali book with a bilingual title. In it he tried to develop a radically new image of the body. He called this body a “materio-spiritual” one that was based in both “science” and “religion.”  He described a set of new deities who resided within the body and controlled such processes as “respiration,” “digestion,” and “blood circulation.” While the idea of deities residing within the body was not new, deities of blood circulation, respiration etc. were indeed novel. The intellectual grounds and arguments that Shaha gave for such a deific and spiritualized understanding of the body were not however, a product simply of “indigenous” ways of knowing. Rather, it drew fairly explicitly, upon an older European tradition of enspirited matter or hylozoism.

   

  

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  The early modern English philosopher, Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), introduced the word “hylozoim” to designate a form of enspirited matter that undermined the neat Cartesian dichotomy between matter and spirit. Several other European scholars, such as the eighteenth-century exponents of “animal magnetism,” articulated one or another version of this theory of enspirited matter that I am following Cudworth in calling hylozoism. This loose tradition of enspirited matter continued to resonate amongst nineteenth-century authors and was adopted by Shaha. But Shaha was certainly not the only one to be attracted to hylozoic ideas. There were several other Bengali contemporaries of Shaha who articulated similar ideas. Historians and other scholars have tended to see these articulations as “hybrid” knowledges created by inflecting “Western science” by “Eastern spirituality.” By drawing on Cudworth’s vocabulary I want to emphasize that far from being “hybrids” that can be neatly parsed apart into monolithic “Western scientific” and “Eastern spiritualist” traditions, these knowledges are in fact complex braids that draw together different strands from within heterogeneous “Western” and “Eastern” bodies of knowledge. My goal in this paper therefore, is to use Shaha’s writings to uncouple “translation” from the discourse of “hybridity” and the implication that knowledge traditions are homogenous monoliths. Instead, I want to rethink the interaction of “Western” and “Eastern” knowledges in a way that is adequately sensitive to the internal heterogeneity of these traditions through the metaphor of braiding.

• Translation and the Making of a Medical Archive: The Case of the Islamic “Translation Movement”

  Ahmed Ragab, Harvard University

  Translation plays a central role in the historiography of Islamic science and medicine. Two episodes of translation bookend the “Golden Age”: the translation from Greek to Arabic, and that from Arabic to Latin. In both processes, translation is understood as a mode of acquisition and/or loss where knowledge moves across a linguistic divide in a process that begins (or ends) a particular historical episode. However, this translation-as-transition paradigm fails to capture the linguistic diversity that existed on both sides of this seeming divide, and the production and consumption of this translated knowledge and its diffusion beyond the spheres of learned scientific and medical practice. In this essay, I look at translation in the history of Islamic medicine not as a transition but rather as a part of a larger and more comprehensive process of archive-making. Through following the works of translators and historians, I investigate how translation contributed to the production of a particular form of learned medicine, and to the making of specific socio- professional identities.

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  Monardes on the Move: Exotic Drugs in European Vernacular Translations

  Alisha Rankin, Tufts University

  In the summer of 1589, a provincial German physician named Johann Wittich (1537–1596) completed and published two short German-language works on foreign and exotic drugs. He promised to provide knowledge on how these substances were “prepared and used in the places where they grow.” Although aimed at completely different audiences and written with different purposes, both works represented partial translations of the bestselling treatise on new world materia medica by the Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588), who had died the previous year. Monardes’ wildly popular treatise was first published in Spanish in 1565 and expanded to three books in 1574. The work’s unflaggingly optimistic picture of the potential medicinal uses for Europeans inspired great interest around Europe, and Wittich’s books were relative latecomers in a long line of translations. Monardes quickly inspired full translations into Latin in 1574, Italian in 1575, and English in 1577. While these translations have received considerable scholarly attention, less well known are the partial translations into French in 1572, Dutch in 1580, and German in 1580, in addition to Wittich’s 1589 translations. All of these publications went into multiple print editions in their respective languages.

  

  "Del Tabaco": the second part of Nicolás Monardes’ treatise on New World drugs, published in Spanish in 1574 and translated into Italian by Giordano Ziletti the same year.

  This essay examines the myriad pathways of Monardes’ work in individual local contexts. It demonstrates the varying role of merchants, printers, and physicians in producing the translations, with a special eye to two specific points: first, translators’ views of the process of translation and, second, the way they extracted (allegedly) indigenous knowledge for local audiences. Some translators took their works directly from Monardes’ original Spanish; others translated from the Latin edition of Carolus Clusius, which significantly altered Monardes’ original piece. Because Monardes’ work was modular, composed of individual entries, translators could pick out the most promising drugs and translate them independently from the complete work. Whatever the specific methodology, however, all of these works ultimately presented Amerindian drugs as crucial to the health—and wealth—of local European populations and thus positioned the translator as an important point of access to these cures.

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  Translating the Skeleton: Anatomical Illustration, Tactile Knowledge, and Medical Body Maps in Early Modern Japan

  Daniel Trambaiolo, University of Hong Kong

  The emergence of practices of anatomical observation and illustration was a key turning point in the history of early modern Japanese medicine. While historians examining this process have devoted considerable attention to the linguistic achievements of the doctors whose interest in anatomy led them to translate European medical texts from Dutch into Japanese, the rich variety of styles of visual representation adopted by 18th- and 19th-century Japanese doctors for communicating their understandings of the body’s internal structures remains poorly studied.

  

  Peeling back the layers of the body. From Kako Ranshū, Kaitai chin’yō (1819).

  Acupuncture, moxibustion, massage, bonesetting, and surgery all depended on knowledge of bodily structure, and practitioners of each of these techniques produced visual maps displaying the spatial arrangement of bodily features important to their own interests. Because these traditions each had their own verbal and visual languages for expressing ideas about the body, there was no consensus about how or whether they could be reconciled. Nevertheless, a number of Japanese doctors beginning in the mid-eighteenth century sought to find ways to translate knowledge across the verbal and visual languages of these different traditions. They were convinced that such translation could help them solve problems they encountered in practice, such as avoiding disruptions to the body’s qi pathways while setting bones, or applying knowledge from anatomical dissections to improve the effectiveness of acupuncture. Japanese illustrators of medical texts sometimes sought to faithfully reproduce the images they found in Chinese and European sources, but in many cases they worked to develop new visual idioms, drawing on both Chinese and European sources of inspiration, abandoning elements that they found irrelevant, and incorporating conceptual and stylistic innovations of their own.

  

  Setting a dislocated jaw. From Kako Ranshū, Sekkō yōketsu (1810)

  In this essay, I argue that analysing the different modes of visual representation Japanese doctors used to communicate knowledge about body structure, as well as their efforts to translate knowledge across different traditions of practice, can lead us towards broader insights concerning the problems of medical translation in the pre-modern world.

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  Naturalizing A Foreign Body: Liu Zhi and the Translation of Arabo-Persian Physiology in Late Imperial China

  Dror Weil, MPIWG

  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a network of Chinese savants, interested in studying Arabo-Persian natural philosophy, strove to reconcile conceptual and theoretical differences between traditional Chinese and Arabo-Persian treatments of the natural world. To that end, members of that Sino-Islamic network experimented with methods of translation, textual analysis, and presentation with the explicit aim of bridging linguistic, conceptual, and theoretical gaps.

  

  "A patient receiving manipulative treatment for a pain in the shoulder" by Pei Qun Zhou. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

  This essay focuses on the works of Liu Zhi 劉智 (1660-1730), a prolific member of the Sino-Islamic network, and examines the theories and practicalities of translation. Liu Zhi's physiological discourse displays an intriguing negotiation between alternative meanings and theories through processes of comparing, distinguishing, and matching traditional Chinese and Western cosmological theories and views of the body. Accordingly, understanding Liu Zhi's works requires looking beyond language and examining the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of these translations. I analyze Lui Zhi’s views of the body and its operation, shedding light on the ways in which he reconstructed overarching Islamic theories of natural philosophy from fragments of Arabic and Persian works on theology, jurisprudence and praxis. By examining the practices of excerption and validation in translating trans-cultural medical knowledge in Liu Zhi's work, this essay offers new insight into the economy of meaning production in early modern Asia, and the mechanisms by which medical knowledge and views of the body travelled across and between geographies, languages, religions, and theories in the early modern period.

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  Lost, and Found in Translation: Narrating the Origins of Medicine

  Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Goldsmiths, University of London

  The topos of the loss of a primordial indigenous knowledge and its subsequent “rediscovery” through translation recurs in many narratives concerning the origins of knowledge. The topos of lost and found in translation is a powerful device of legitimation: it creates an opportunity to present new ideas, whilst still maintaining a link with older, established authorities. The narrative of lost knowledge has been at the heart of what has been the dominant European historiography of the history of medicine—and indeed of history of science at large.

   

  

  Paul Pelliot examining the Dunhuang manuscripts. Source: Musée Guimet.

  This essay addresses the question: Can we trace a longue durée history of the “Lost and found in translation” topos? It also analyzes how notions of “lost knowledge” are linked to a Eurocentric historiography of medicine, a historiography that saw Europe as the rightful heir of ancient Greek philosophy and science, and which failed to acknowledge that important centers of learning were situated in the eastern Mediterranean and to the east of the Mediterranean. Looking at sources produced in once great, but now forgotten hubs of trade and culture—places like Edessa, Dunhuang, or Tabriz—where enterprises of translations took place, no less grand and no less important than the well-studied Greek into Arabic translation projects of Baghdad, can help us to “re-orient” Eurocentric historiography and refocus on translations to and from forgotten or marginalized languages.

  As an example of this topos, this essay will analyze a Hebrew narrative on the origins of medical knowledge which forms part of the introduction to the Book of Medicine (Sefer Re’fuot, aka: Book of Asaf). “Translation” in this text refers to two types of translation: the translation of divine knowledge into human knowledge, and translation from one language into another. The introduction to the Book of Asaf offers a response to the question, “Why is it worthwhile to translate foreign knowledge?” The author answers by suggesting that the knowledge contained in the text originally belonged to Semites, that it was then lost, stolen, forgotten, or preserved only elsewhere. Translation is therefore presented as a form of reclaiming. This essay illuminates the function and role of this topos and reveals its widespread importance in various translation movements.