East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

Theobald, Ulrich

Cao Cong, China’s Scientific Elite

East Asian 
Science, Technology, 
and Medicine 
 
Number 32 
2010 
 
A journal dedicated to the study of traditional and modern 
East Asian science, technology, and medicine. 
 
Editor-in-Chief 
Hans Ulrich Vogel 
Asien-Orient-Institut, 
Abteilung für Sinologie und Koreanistik, 
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen 
eastm@uni-tuebingen.de 
 
 
Editors 
Mark Elvin                                                                                     Robert Horres 
Emeritus Fellow, St. Antony‘s                                        Asien-Orient-Institut 
College, Oxford                                                        Abteilung für Japanologie 
Emeritus Professor, ANU, Canberra                            Universität Tübingen 
 
 
Managing and Production Editor 
Alexander Jost and Katharina Markgraf, 
Abteilung für Sinologie und Koreanistik, Tübingen 
 
 
English Language Editor: 
John P. C. Moffett, Needham Research Institute, Cambridge (UK) 
 
 
Local Advisory Board: 
Klaus J. Antoni, Abteilung für Japanologie, Tübingen 
Viktoria Eschbach-Szabo, Abteilung für Japanologie, Tübingen 
You Jae Lee, Abteilung für Sinologie und Koreanistik, Tübingen 
Achim Mittag, Abteilung für Sinologie und Koreanistik, Tübingen 
EDITORIAL COMMITTEE 
Bridie Andrews-Minehan, Department of History, Bentley College 
Francesca Bray, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh 
Christopher Cullen, Needham Research Institute and Darwin College, 
Cambridge 
Benjamin A. Elman, East Asian Studies and History, Princeton University 
Charlotte Furth, Department of History, University of Southern California, 
Los Angeles 
Hashimoto Keizō, Faculty of Sociology, Kansai University, Osaka 
Huang Yi-Long, Institute of History, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu 
Jeon Sang-woon, The Korean Academy of Science and Technology, Seongnam 
Catherine Jami, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris 
Yung Sik Kim, College of Humanities, Seoul National University 
Dieter Kuhn, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften Ost- und Südasiens, 
Sinologie,Universität Würzburg 
Angela Ki Che Leung, History Department, The Chinese University of Hong 
Kong, Hong Kong 
Liu Bing, Institute of Science, Technology and Society, Tsinghua 
University,Beijing 
Liu Dun, Institute for the History of Natural Science, Academia Sinica, Beijing 
Morris Low, School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, 
University of Queensland, Brisbane  
Georges Métailié, Centre Alexandre Koyré, CNRS-EHESS-MNHN, Paris 
Shi Yunli, Department of the History of Science and Scientific Archaeology, 
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 
Nathan Sivin, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University 
of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 
C. Michele Thompson, Department of History, Southern Connecticut State 
University, New Haven 
Tsukahara Togo, History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine, 
Kobe University 
Paul U. Unschuld, Horst-Götz-Stiftungsinstitut für Theorie, Geschichte und 
Ethik Chinesischer Lebenswissenschaften, Charité, Berlin 
Donald B. Wagner, Department of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen 
Yoshida Tadashi, Center for Northeast Asian Studies, Tohoku University, 
Sendai 
 
 
 
THE SCOPE OF EASTM 
Copyright  2010. EASTM (formerly Chinese Science) is published by the 
International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and 
Medicine (ISHEASTM). Numbers 1-10 (1975-1992) were published irregularly 
under the editorship of Nathan Sivin (University of Pennsylvania). Numbers 11-
15 (1993-1998) were issued annually at the University of California, Los Angeles, 
by Benjamin A. Elman. Beginning with Number 16 (1999), the name of the journal 
changed to East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine and it is published by 
Hans Ulrich Vogel at the University of Tübingen, Germany. The publication of 
this periodical is supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 
(DFG). 
This journal includes studies on the science, technology, and medicine of 
traditional and contemporary East Asia. Any study based on original research 
using Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese primary sources or artifacts, that 
elucidates the relationships and interactions of science, technology, and medicine 
with politics, society, economics, philosophy, culture, religion, historiography, as 
well as their disciplinary traditions, or throws light on the work of scientists, 
technologists, and physicians in East Asia will gladly be considered. 
SUBMISSIONS 
Potential contributors are encouraged to correspond with the editor before 
submitting manuscripts in order to ensure that their work falls within the 
purview of EASTM, and to simplify the preparation of the final copy. All 
contributions except invited reviews are refereed. The editor does not referee. For 
Chinese romanization, both Pinyin and Wade-Giles transcriptions are accepted, 
while for Japanese and Korean, the Hepburn and McCune/Reischauer systems 
are to be used. With regard to style and format, contributors should refer to the 
latest issue of EASTM. Information on the preparation of manuscripts and their 
submission in electronic form will also be provided on request. 
SUBSCRIPTIONS AND PAYMENTS 
ISHEASTM MEMBER RATE, gives right to all issues of the journal in the 
membership period (currently four years and eight issues), postage paid (surface 
mail) anywhere: normal rate € 90.00 or US$ 120.00; concessional rate for PhD 
students, postdocs within first five years of their PhD, or retired persons: € 16.00 
or US$ 22.00. 
INSTITUTIONAL RATE, one year, two issues € 55.00 or US$ 74.00, postage paid 
(surface mail) anywhere; single issues, postage paid (surface mail) anywhere: 
€ 28.00 or US$ 38.00. 
BACK ISSUES: The issues no. 1-11 of Chinese Science are out of print, but can be 
downloaded online at www.uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/philosophische-
fakultaet/fachbereiche/aoi/sinologie-koreanistik/eastm.html. Members of the 
Society (which includes all individuals holding a subscription) as well as institu-
tions may purchase back issues at a special rate upon inquiry with the Editor-in-
Chief (eastm@uni-tuebingen.de). 
PAYMENT METHODS: For individual subscriptions PayPal is our preferred 
method. For institutional subscriptions we prefer electronic funds transfer direct 
to our bank account as shown on our invoice. For other methods, contact the 
Treasurer. 
Subscribers are requested to notify the editorial office of any changes in address, 
and to pay the invoice, which will be sent prior to the expiry of the subscription, 
promptly. 
Send orders or inquiries to the Treasurer of ISHEASTM: treasurer@isheastm.org 
PUBLICATION FREQUENCY 
From 2011 onwards there will be one normal issue of EASTM each year, and one 
special issue, making two issues each year. 
HOME PAGE 
For more information on the journal please also consult the home page 
maintained at Tübingen University: www.uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/ 
philosophische-fakultaet/fachbereiche/aoi/sinologie-koreanistik/eastm.html. 
ISHEASTM 
The publication, since the fifties, of Joseph Needham‘s (1900-1995) monumental 
work, Science and Civilisation in China, has been followed by a rapid development 
of research on the history of science, technology, and medicine in China, as well 
as in civilisations upon which Chinese culture exerted an important influence, 
such as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Beginning in 1982, International Conferences 
on the History of Science in China were held at irregular intervals. At the sixth of 
these conferences, held in Cambridge in 1990 in honour of Joseph Needham‘s 
ninetieth birthday, participants agreed to found the International Society for the 
History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (ISHEASTM). 
The Society‘s purpose is to serve, represent and speak for scholars of the field 
defined by its name. It aims, primarily, to promote contacts and exchanges 
between these scholars, and also to establish and reinforce links with other 
scholarly communities at an international level. The Society‘s activities include: 
• The organisation of a plenary meeting every three years (Kyoto 1993, Seoul 
1996, Singapore 1999, Shanghai 2002, Munich 2005, Baltimore 2008; Heifei 2011), 
and thereafter at four-yearly intervals; 
• The publication of a journal, EASTM; 
• The provision of an email discussion group for members. 
For more information on the Society, see the website at http://isheastm.org. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This journal is printed on acid-free paper.                                        ISSN #1562-918X 


Editorial

Contents 
 
 
 
Note from the Editor-in-Chief 7 
 
Online Availability of EASTM: A Note on the Future 12 
 
 
The Rong Cheng shi 容 成 氏 Version of the ‘Nine Provinces’: 
Some Parallels with Transmitted Texts 
—VERA DOROFEEVA-LICHTMANN 13 
 
A Korean Reading of Newtonian Mechanics in the  
Nineteenth Century 
—JUN YONG HOON 59 
 
“A Flock of Ghosts Bursting Forth and Scattering”:  
Healing Narratives in a Sixth-Century Chinese 
Buddhist Hagiography 
 —C. PIERCE SALGUERO 89 
Reviews 
 
Yvonne Dold-Samplonius, Joseph W. Dauben, Menso Folkerts 
and Benno van Dalen (eds.), From China to Paris: 2000 Years 
Transmission of Mathematical Ideas 
—reviewed by Karin Reich 121 
 
Luciana Galliano (ed.), Power, Beauty and Meaning: Eight 
Studies on Chinese Music 
—reviewed by Barbara Mittler 124 
 
Hartmut Walravens (ed.), David Crockett Graham (1884-1961) as 
Zoological Collector and Anthropologist in China 
—reviewed by Mareile Flitsch 130 
 
Alan K. L. Chan, Gregory K. Clancey, and Hui-Chieh Loy 
(eds.), Historical Perspectives on East Asian Science, 
Technology and Medicine 
—reviewed by Morris Low 136 
 
G. E. R. Lloyd, The Delusions of Invulnerability: Wisdom and 
Morality in Ancient Greece, China and Today 
—reviewed by Mark Elvin 140 
 
 
Announcement 
 
Research Opportunities at the Needham Research Institute 
(NRI) 149 
 


Jun, Yong Hoon

A Korean Reading of Newtonian Mechanics in the Nineteenth Century 

Park, Changbom

100 EASTM 31 (2010) 
Maeyama Yasukatsu, Astronomy in Orient and Occident. Hildesheim, New 
York: G. Olms, 2003, x, 562 pp. 
 
Changbom Park 
 
[Changbom Park graduated from Department of Astronomy, Seoul National 
University and received his Ph.D. in Science from Department of Astrophysical 
Sciences, Princeton University. Presently he is Professor at the School of Phys-
ics, Korea Institute for Advanced Study. He studies cosmology and the large-
scale structure of the universe. He also carries out research in astronomical his-
tory, archaeo-astronomy, and astronomical sciences using historical records and 
remains]. 
 
This is a collection of 25 papers by Professor Maeyama Yasukatsu前 山 
保 勝 published between 1974 and 2000 who is a Professor Emeritus for 
history of astronomy at the Institute for History of Science in J. W. Goethe 
University in Frankfurt, Germany. He was born in Sapporo, Japan, in 
1931, and studied at Tohoku University and J. W. Goethe University un-
der the supervision of Willy Hartner. 
The papers in this book deal with various topics of historical astron-
omy spanning the East and the West. They are precious pieces of work in 
the field of history of astronomy that are almost beyond compare. Many 
of them, however, might seem almost impossible for ordinary historians 
to understand since they often present mathematical formulae and fig-
ures, and adopt statistical techniques to draw key conclusions. The level 
of mathematics and statistics used in the papers are actually not very 
high for people in the field, but their proper understanding does require 
some experience in scientific research and a good knowledge of celestial 
mechanics. 
I personally find Professor Maeyama’s works greatly impressive be-
cause he introduced scientific techniques to the field of history of science 
so early, and applied them to a wide range of topics covering the East to 
the West in space and from Babylonia to the Renaissance in time. In par-
ticular, I was surprised to read that he used the minimum variance 
method to determine the epoch of constellation maps some twenty years 
before I applied it to measure the epoch of the Korean planisphere, Cheon-
Sang-Yoel-Cha-Bun-Ya-Ji-Do 天 象 列 次 分 野 之 圖. 
He presents various formulae for the motions of solar system objects 
derived from celestial mechanics often in great detail. In many of the 
papers the text is full of mathematical formulae derived by him explain-
ing the motions of celestial bodies. These formulae are extremely helpful 
101 Reviews 
to those who want to understand the approximate scientific models of the 
past. 
Nevertheless, these formulae occupy too much space in the book and 
are presented in too much detail, often disturbing the flow of ideas in the 
text. The author should have presented almost all derivations in the ap-
pendices, since the readers do not need to know how all those formulae 
have been obtained. Only the final formulae, those needed to address the 
issues at hand, should appear in the main text. Since celestial mechanics 
problems can be easily solved with extreme precision by computers these 
days, one can now reply on computer packages to conduct similar his-
torical studies. (Of course, a deeper understanding of the historical de-
velopment of theories can be better obtained through analytic formulae 
like those in this book.) A further difficulty of this book is that most of the 
papers in this book do not have abstracts. This makes it difficult for the 
reader to grasp the issues and main conclusions of each paper, despite the 
author repeatedly presenting, throughout the book, his views about how 
astronomical theories have developed.  
 
I briefly review the chapters of this book below. 
 
Chapter I: Far East 
This chapter consists of five papers on historical Chinese astronomy. Top-
ics covered include the oldest Chinese star catalogue, development of the 
28 lunar mansions, the equatorial coordinate system and the pole star, 
and the four cardinal points of the compass. 
 
Chapter II: Antiquity 
The first two papers in this chapter are about Babylonian knowledge of 
the motion of the Moon. These are extensive works on Babylonian lunar 
theory, which require knowledge of the motions of both the Moon and 
the Sun. The third paper compares the ancient stellar observations by 
Timocharis, Aristyllus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy. The author applies 
statistical techniques to estimate the accuracy of stellar positions and to 
find the epoch of observation. 
 
Chapter III: Renaissance 
The papers in this chapter mainly deal with the understanding of the 
motion of the Sun or the orbital motion of the Earth from the time of the 
ancient Greeks to the Renaissance. A large part of these papers is devoted 
to analytic formulae for solar theory. 
 
 
102 EASTM 31 (2010) 
 
Chapter IV: Motion of celestial objects 
In this chapter Maeyama presents nine papers containing numerous, 
highly detailed mathematical formulae for the motion of celestial objects. 
The formulae include analytic expressions for the synodic periods of 
planetary motions, the motion of planets around a certain reference point, 
and the length of seasons. They can be useful in estimating the accuracy 
of traditional models, and finding the major improvements in the histori-
cal theories. Therefore, this part of the book is the kind of source material 
that can be used for historical purposes.  
 
Chapter V: General history of astronomy 
I was able to read only one out of the two papers in this chapter. Here the 
author inspects the development of astronomy in different places on the 
Earth and in different periods of human history to show some fundamen-
tal similarities and dissimilarities. For this purpose he reviews qualita-
tively the history of the knowledge of parallax, precession, and motions 
of the celestial bodies. 
 


Maeyama Yasukatsu, Astronomy in Orient and Occident 

The Rong Cheng shi 容成氏 Version of the 'Nine Provinces': Some Parallels with Transmitted Text

Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Vera

The Rong Cheng shi 容成氏 Version of the 'Nine Provinces': Some Parallels with Transmitted Texts

Sivin, Nathan

108 EASTM 30 (2009) 
Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthe-
sis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002, xvii, 407 pp.  
 
Nathan Sivin 
 
[Nathan Sivin is Professor of Chinese Culture and of the History of Science, 
Emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Granting the 
Seasons, a study and translation of the most important Chinese treatise on math-
ematical astronomy (1280). He is now working on a survey of health care in the 
eleventh century.] 
 
 
Physical science and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist doctrines have been transmuting 
the doctrines and practice of Zhongyi 中 医 for nearly a century. Under the new 
gospel of “to get rich is glorious” the process is, if anything, accelerating. State 
planners expect Chinese medicine gradually to become an integral part of twenty-
first-century thought, attain synthesis with biomedicine (xiyi 西 医), and speed 
the flow of income from abroad. Be that as it may, non-Chinese over much of the 
world make use of Zhongyi‟s methods and products because—in their eyes—its 
ancient roots make it intriguingly exotic, because its values are distinct from what 
they believe are the compromised ideals of modern medicine. Official spokesmen, 
to meet this yearning of the outside world for something of the old China, trans-
late Zhongyi “Traditional Chinese Medicine,” TCM for short. Just about every 
introductory book on the subject begins by emphasizing its multi-millennial an-
cestry. Nevertheless, its ties to early doctrine and practice become ever more 
tenuous. 
Scheid makes it clear that to understand what is happening we have to appre-
hend Zhongyi in many dimensions. Government functionaries, who decide on 
budgets and medical-school recruitment quotas, live in a different mental world 
from those who practice medicine—not to mention those on whom they practice 
it. Within the ruling strata, hostility continues quietly to seethe between the 
champions of Zhongyi and those who consider it a useless relic of the past. And 
each practitioner, as well as each patient, experiences the world and acts on it 
differently: “No two doctors diagnose, prescribe, or treat in quite the same way” 
(p. 9). They define their identities not only by their place in long lineages, but by 
how they are using biomedical knowledge and technology to reshape their prac-
tices.  
“Traditional” practice incorporates countless new elements. The officially 
promoted system of “pattern differentiation and treatment determination (bian-
zheng lunzhi 辩 证 论 治)” was a creation of the last half-century; ear acupunc-
ture was a French invention; the use of standard formulas processed into pills or 
capsules is becoming increasingly dominant. “Chinese medical case records must 
carry a biomedical diagnosis. Several doctors informed me that while hospital 
109 Reviews 
authorities are lax about the Chinese medical diagnosis, a Western medical diag-
nosis is obligatory for all records (that is, not only for case records but also for 
outpatient treatment records, laboratory examination requests, etc.)” (p. 93). In 
every aspect of medicine, syncretism and ambiguity are the rule, but this is not 
the standardized syncretism the state wants. 
As the subtitle of this book implies, its framework has little in common with 
the main stream of research on the history of Chinese medicine. Conventional 
studies see that enterprise as one system, competing with biomedical, popular, 
religious, empirical, and other systems. They describe its techniques, practition-
ers, and doctrines, and explain what leads people to choose its therapy. Scheid 
argues cogently and passionately that seeking a single system or essence that 
subsumes all the variation is self-defeating. Such a unity “has long since seeped 
through the cracks between whatever fragile articulations bind „Chinese‟ to „med-
icine,‟ and further to „contemporary‟ and „China‟” (p. 19). 
Scheid is himself an expert Zhongyi; he has practiced his craft since 1984. He 
is also a deeply learned scholar of early medicine, a sophisticated social anthro-
pologist, and an accomplished critical thinker. This book is a most unusual eth-
nology, based on participant observation over sixteen months between 1994 and 
1999. Its object is not a single institution or group, but the whole state sector of 
medical practice, education, and regulation. Scheid studies “the intersection of 
ideological, institutional, historical, and personal struggles” in Beijing, where 
that sector is strongest (p. 2). 
This is a work of great ambition, far transcending medicine. It denies that 
Chinese or Western medicine is a system in any essential sense. Both unendingly 
changing, they are merely “concepts for and against which to form a position and 
methodology.” It posits that “accounting for and describing the plural and often 
dispersed interactions at local levels that create, support, destabilize, and tear 
apart [unstable, temporary] global coherences … emerges as the new task of any 
anthropology of medicine” (pp. 13-14, 19-20). I would prefer to say “a new 
task,” since all anthropologists are no more likely than all Sinologists to clamber 
aboard any one bandwagon. 
Scheid‟s stance is post-humanist, allied to that of Andrew Pickering, which 
denies that the determinants of technical change are exclusively human. Scheid 
argues plausibly that in medical thought qi 氣 is an agent, even though obviously 
not in the sense that a physician can be one. Whether one accepts this postmod-
ern stance or not—most of social and political life has hardly evolved past the 
Neolithic, much less past modernity—Scheid characterizes Chinese medicine out 
of his empirical material. He avoids the ambiguity, coy paradoxes, and postmod-
speak on which the fashionable rely to impress their disciples. This epistemology 
yields a rich harvest. 
Concepts and doctrines. The Chinese body has never been a fixed notion. Its 
dynamics greatly outweigh its notions of structure. Systems for identifying bodily 
dysfunctions, schemata of relationships between pulses and visceral functions, 
links between diagnosis and therapy, have mutated through the centuries. Line-
110 EASTM 30 (2009) 
ages of physicians insisted upon neither unitary doctrines nor a single mode of 
knowledge transmission, and there was no profession to enforce either.  
Despite government regulation today, that remains the situation. Because the 
menu of illnesses varies with political vicissitudes and changes in culture, there is 
no consensus on how and when Chinese medicine is to be modernized, or where 
the border lies between traditional and modern forms. Heavily subsidized official 
attempts to integrate Chinese and Western medicine have not yielded a generally 
useful model. Instead of lessening the diversity they have simply added to it.  
Patients. Patients often say that Western medicine is best for acute disorders 
and Chinese for chronic. Nevertheless, Scheid shows that they base their actual 
choices on cost, quality of care, attitudes and behavior of therapists, politics, and 
so on. In the twenty-first-century market economy, many kinds of therapy, Chi-
nese and Western style, have become too expensive for ordinary people. Patients 
who choose “traditional” therapists increasingly report their problems in terms of 
such biomedical categories as diabetes or hepatitis, or refer to laboratory results. 
Because younger patients no longer understand yin-yang and the five phases, 
Zhongyi use Western disease models in their explanations.  
Physicians. It is now routine for practitioners of Chinese medicine to name 
biomedical diseases when advertising their specialties. That is what patients ex-
pect, and doctors know better than to ignore “grassroots power” (pp. 130-131). 
Scheid‟s case study of a cardiologist trained in TCM and “integrated medicine 
(Zhongxiyi jiehe 中 西 医 结 合)”—who opposes both conventional biomedicine 
and the more conservative Zhongyi—shows that “what changes in the process of 
innovation is not Chinese medicine as a system but the practices and views of 
individual physicians” (p. 161). This is the book‟s key point. 
Here is Scheid‟s conclusion: “To argue that contemporary Chinese physicians 
are losing, or may already have lost, touch with traditional medicine misses a 
more significant point—namely, that it is possible to communicate effectively 
across apparently incommensurable paradigms, that horizons are essentially 
open, that plurality is practicable. … the integration of biomedical practices and 
concepts into the field of contemporary Chinese medicine teaches us much about 
how to engage with the other without abandoning the integrity of the self” (p. 
163, my italics). This takes us far beyond the cliché (espoused by superficial 
analysts such as myself) that tradition is bound to resist the modern, but in the 
end is bound to fail.1 
Becoming a physician. Study of a famous old Chinese physician shows how 
a multiplicity of social interactions continually remakes doctrine and practice. 
Prof. Rong has a few disciples (assigned by the government) and number of 
graduate students. The disciples accompany him in the clinic, see patients, record 
his cases for his archive, help with his writing, and do research. One, his son, 
                                                 
1 My 1987 book, Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: Center 
for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan), was based on a study of doctrines taught in 
schools of Chinese medicine during the Cultural Revolution. 
111 Reviews 
embodies the tenth generation of his line, joining him in treating powerful pa-
tients. Another teaches, assists in his writing and, as a teacher, incorporates 
Rong‟s medical lineage into the state bureaucracy. Their relationship gives them 
access to “older forms of social organization, morality, particularism, and implic-
it (or even secret) knowledge” that conflicts with the official educational insist-
ence on the modern, universal, and scientific (p. 177). 
Rong‟s students mainly work on dissertations, which, among many other 
things, “support the marketing of his patented formulas” in China and abroad (p. 
195). The more ambitious strive to establish personal ties that make them more 
like disciples. Some, when later they work in foreign countries, draw on Rong‟s 
international reputation and in turn add to his renown. 
Just as important in forming physicians are Rong‟s activities as an author of 
textbooks and a member of national committees on curricula. He is one of those 
who define the authorized knowledge on which medical-school educations are 
based. Committee members with the greatest prestige decide which of the many 
formulas and clinical patterns (zheng 证) are included and which are ignored. 
Such patterns of personal guanxi 关 系 have, for instance, made dominant in 
official teaching Ye Gui‟s 叶 桂 (or Ye Tianshi 天 士, 1667-1746) patterns for 
diagnosing liver disorders, and banished from the educational system those that 
other well-known physicians prefer. But Rong‟s local and national ties do not 
begin to exhaust the varieties of guanxi; financial relations and contacts on the 
Internet play tangible parts in the careers of other doctors. All these offer ways 
round the Party‟s prescribed ideals of conduct. The content of networks is always 
changing as new possibilities emerge; practitioners recognize each other‟s at-
tempts to combine learning from Han dynasty medical writings with that from the 
New England Journal of Medicine. 
Bianzheng lunzhi 辩 证 论 治, “pattern differentiation and treatment deter-
mination,” often described in medical-school textbooks as the pivot of Chinese 
medicine, is not traditional but an invention of the 1950‟s. From then on, this 
characterization became the norm for contrasting Chinese and Western medicine, 
and for linking TCM to “the shifting Maoist vision regarding the function of 
medicine in society” (p. 209). Teaching it in the new medical schools as an an-
cient form of “dialectics based on naive materialism” promised that “under the 
guidance of the Party and with the help of Western science” modernization could 
succeed (p. 217). 
But there is an unending tension between older generations of doctors (lao-
zhongyi 老 中 医) who insist on the primacy of experience (jingyan 经 验), based 
in the treatment of patients and classical study, and younger ones who find statis-
tics and electron microscopes more accessible than the Yellow Emperor canon. 
Neither group supports in their practice the state‟s view of pattern differentiation 
and treatment determination as a basis for standardizing doctrine and practice. 
Thus bianzheng lunzhi, touted as the basis of TCM, “continually threatens to fall 
apart and needs to be reasserted … [it] continually emerges and disappears as an 
object, discourse, and practice” (p. 237). 
112 EASTM 30 (2009) 
Scheid‟s final example of synthesis and plurality is his case study of a new 
disease in TCM, zhongfeng bu yu 中 风 不 语. He follows the research of a doc-
toral candidate at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine who worked out a new 
nosology to replace a jumble of classical terms for the speech impediments that 
follow a cerebrovascular accident; drew on “biomedical theories regarding the 
production of speech and its pathology” (p. 241); used CAT and MRI scanners to 
study the physiology of the disease; and employed acupuncture loci that Sun 
Simiao 孙 思 邈 had needled 1400 years earlier for similar purposes, adding a 
carefully planned treatment protocol and a control group. Scheid‟s ethnology 
records not only what the experimenter thought and did, but other pertinent di-
mensions: the ancient methods he drew on, the rules he followed, the expecta-
tions of his university and of his two very differently inclined supervisors, the 
standardized tests that his project substituted for classical diagnostic skills, his 
frustration because in TCM guanxi trumped the open propagation of knowledge, 
and so on. His innovation was a hybrid of the natural, the technological, the intel-
lectual, and the sociocultural. That is the norm, but not all historians recognize it. 
The plurality that Scheid has richly documented is not a special characteristic 
of Chinese medicine. Rather, it is “the way things always are—forever changing 
and transforming origins in the whirlpool of their simultaneously present pasts 
and futures.” The dynamic processes that have guided the medical tradition for 
two thousand years are what guide all human striving. In Scheid‟s ethnography, 
“Maoist philosophies of practical dialectics were seen to be infiltrating the treas-
ure-house of Chinese medicine, biomedical concepts of physiology and cybernet-
ics met with the health care of workers and peasants, while century-old tools of 
clinical practice reshaped modern biomedical physiology” (p. 263). 
Historians of medicine do not ordinarily think through a metaphysics, but 
adopt willy-nilly whatever view of reality is conventional in their particular grove 
of academe. Unaware though we may be of our own, we have no trouble recog-
nizing the Maoism of China ca. 1970, or the reductionistic positivism that is the 
norm among scientists in China and elsewhere today. This book, by its frankness 
and its independence of philosophic fashion, will jolt some readers into examin-
ing their presuppositions. We can do with fewer pious reaffirmations of the con-
ventional wisdom. 
What, then, does this book have to say about the future of Chinese medicine? 
That art is bound to remake itself, as it has been doing through the centuries. Of 
its many possible futures, what matters most is the war between two of them. One 
is the official view that, to survive, Zhongyi must be remade in the image of 
modern biomedicine by standardizing and imposing physical reductionism. The 
other leaves the future in the hands of those who practice, forming and reforming 
personal syntheses, using their tools with more or less success, correcting failures 
as they “take small steps, favor reversibility, plan on surprises” (p. 271). 
“What, ultimately, is gained from restraining Chinese medicine by means of a 
rationality blind to its own irrational constitution, and gained for whom? … Why 
not entertain the notion that the plurality of agents that impinge on human health 
113 Reviews 
may best be engaged by means of a similar plurality in the domain of medicine?” 
(p. 273). 
Having looked to the power of the state to attain its goal a quarter century 
ago, and having seen it fail, I have to admit that leaving the future of medicine to 
its practitioners—one by one—is the only realistic option. This is, to sum up, a 
book of the utmost historiographic, ethnographic, and practical importance. 


Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis 

Cover

Warding off Calamity in Japan: A Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Print

Smits, Gregory

Warding off Calamity in Japan: A Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Prints

Raina, Dhruv

114 EASTM 30 (2009) 
Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj: A Study of British India. Second Edition, 
Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 2006, 348 pp. 
 
Dhruv Raina 
 
[Dhruv Raina is Professor of History of Science and Education at Jawaharlal 
Nehru University, New Delhi. He received his Ph.D. from Göteborg University. 
He works on the history of science in South Asia and has authored and co-
authored books on the subject. In 1999, with S. Irfan Habib he co-edited Situat-
ing the History of Sciences: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (Oxford University 
Press, New Delhi). He is currently completing a book on cultures of history and 
science policy in South Asia and another one of the historiography of Indian 
mathematics.] 
 
 
The providence of the first book published in an emerging area of study is that it 
exponentially triggers off publications in the area it ostensibly inaugurates. 
Deepak Kumar’s book Science and Raj was first published in 1995, and high-
lighted a decade’s preoccupation with the politics of scientific knowledge in 
colonial India that had emerged as a central research theme in India and else-
where in the 1980s. While “science and society” had been a frame for the study 
of the history of science in India since the 1950s, it was one elaborated upon by a 
microscopic minority of historians of science working in the field and struggling 
to anchor its concerns and questions in the landscape of South Asian history 
writing. The moment did arrive in the 1980s when scholars from a diversity of 
disciplinary backgrounds in India and Europe, followed later by the United 
States, began to prise open the black box of science, technology and politics and 
address the relationship between colonialism and scientific knowledge. Breaking 
away from a broadly positivist conception of science, these studies sought to 
address a larger set of questions about the relationship between the expansion of 
modern European science and the political project of imperialism. Similar re-
search efforts were undertaken for other non-Western culture areas and experi-
ences and these networks coalesced into what has come to be better known as the 
“Science and Empires” network, the idea for which began to take shape at an 
Indo-French conference that took place in New Delhi in 1985.  
The first edition of Kumar’s book was thus amongst the early books on the 
subject, even while several of the chapters that appeared in the book were pub-
lished in the mid to late 1980s, when the field was fast developing into an im-
portant research theme in the history of the non-Western sciences. The book has 
since been through several impressions and the publishers have now brought out 
a second edition, which comprises a marginally modified first chapter and an 
additional chapter that extends the discussion from “Victorian India” up to 1947, 
the commencement of decolonization. Reading the book after more than a decade 
after its first edition appeared, what became evidently clear was how much of the 
115 Reviews 
social theory that undergirds the history of science in South Asia had changed, 
and we naturally expected this to be reflected in the new introduction to the book. 
Further several unsettled issues that marked the 1990s may have found some 
closure and ought to have been discussed or reviewed in the new introduction. 
But the author has begged off in his preface: “Full revision was not possible”, nor 
expected, but possibly some revision should have been anticipated.  
To begin with, it has been difficult to pin down the role of technology in the 
expansion of the colonial project. Does Kumar agree with Headrick’s technologi-
cal determinist interpretation or does he to commit himself to the supremacy of 
politics in the technological realm. Apparently he steers clear of all varieties of 
the “constructivist” perspectives of technology that have marked the literature of 
the last three decades. Furthermore, the notion of modernity or development is 
never reflexively interrogated in the light of the debates and major challenges 
posed by sociologically oriented history that has compelled, in turn, a revision of 
an uncritical notion of modernity and development theory and its cognate version 
of the history of science that dictates several of the issues raised in the first chap-
ter and sets the frames for the very responses. Consequently, Kumar must carry 
the burden of the standard version of modernist history of science that severely 
constrains the articulation of a broader thesis on science and colonialism. This 
also explains the difficulty encountered in disentangling himself from a web of 
his own weaving when discussing Pyenson on science and imperialism. In this 
discussion the epistemic aspects of nineteenth-century science run alongside its 
political aspects, without either confronting or disentangling the Pyensonian 
argument. On the other hand Kumar moves sideways in suggesting that the nature 
of colonial science is such that the two cannot be separated. 
Evidently the sciences that he largely construes in his discussion are what he 
calls the “imperial sciences” or the “field sciences”, as some historians of science 
have pointed out. Perhaps there was something to learn from Foucault, that for-
midable theorist of knowledge-power, who admitted that even though the “great 
empirical knowledge that covered the things of the world ...” that co-evolved 
with the “economic and political conquest” of the world had its operating model 
in the Inquisition, it was able to develop “technique” that liberated it from the 
“inquisitorial procedure”. On the other hand the human sciences remained 
grounded in the “examination” that has been unable to distance itself from “dis-
ciplinary power”.1 
Furthermore, colonial science for Kumar lacks sovereignty that was all the 
more encumbered by the rise of colonial power. So, colonial power conditioned 
scientific knowledge. Yet, he says that this science was not derivative either—a 
highly loaded term that I shall not elaborate upon. Surely it was not derivative, 
but then the account has to be sensitive to the nature of the institutionalization of 
                                                 
1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from 
the French by Alan Sheridan, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977, p. 226. 
 
116 EASTM 30 (2009) 
science, which once established acquires a relative autonomy, one that is a pre-
requisite for the performance of science. Without this relative autonomy it would 
not be possible to explain the emergence of “national scientific traditions” within 
the colonial rubric and contesting the same. The notion of what is meant by de-
rivative science is not elaborated, but more interestingly the work does not en-
gage with the processes of attenuation, cultural redefinition, domestication, natu-
ralization or hybridization—all of which depart from the osmotic metaphor of the 
transmission of scientific knowledge. But these are issues that have been well 
debated and I would like to flag up two more points germane to the second edi-
tion of the book, though I would not hold the same for the first edition. 
The first is the persistence of an obsolete historiography of pre-colonial sci-
ence, present in the previous edition as well, that are encountered towards the end 
of the first chapter pertaining to science in India before colonialism. This histori-
ography was founded on the tropes of decline and a notion of an “Indian” tradi-
tion that was impervious to modern influences. This frame has for more than two 
decades been seen as unconstructive in understanding the pre-colonial period and 
has been critiqued from historical sociological accounts of “alternate moderni-
ties” and “multiple modernities”. The new histories of science and knowledge 
depart considerably from the received picture so much so that Kumar’s remarks 
on the subject may be said to belong to the pre-history of the current discourse on 
the subject. None of the new historical work that has transformed our understand-
ing of pre-colonial South Asia informs the discussion concerning knowledge or 
science in South Asia before colonialism—perhaps some reflexive engagement 
with the conceptual categories employed would have proved beneficial. Second-
ly, the author refuses to engage with recent scholarship that differs substantially 
with his aperçus or the spirit of his work—at best there is a cursory mention of 
that work as a passing remark that does not even gesture in a footnote to the work 
of the scholars concerned. To take a case in point, the papers and books of Shiv 
Visvanathan, Zaheer Baber and Gyan Prakash,2 among several others, markedly 
differ on important points with Kumar’s reading, but in the book under discus-
sion there is little engagement with their writing. This is a matter of choice, of 
course. Nevertheless, an engagement with these other viewpoints would only 
have extended the shelf-life of a book rich in historical detail and which histori-
ans of science open to be surprised by a new nuance or historical fragment that 
would inspire further research. 
 
                                                 
2 Shiv Visvanathan, Organizing for Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; 
Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization and Colonial 
Rule in India, New York: State University Press, 1996; Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: 
Science and the Imagination in Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
1999. 


Not a member yet

Cao Cong, China’s Scientific Elite

Editorial

Contents

A Korean Reading of Newtonian Mechanics in the Nineteenth Century

Maeyama Yasukatsu, Astronomy in Orient and Occident

The Rong Cheng shi 容成氏 Version of the 'Nine Provinces': Some Parallels with Transmitted Texts

Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis

Cover

Warding off Calamity in Japan: A Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Prints

Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj: A Study of British India

370

608