Cultures in Motion by Reimitz Helmut Rodgers Daniel T. Raman Bhavani

Author:Reimitz, Helmut, Rodgers, Daniel T., Raman, Bhavani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

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.

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