Taking the Pulse between Early Modern China and Europe: The Drifting Touch
Chapter in The Routledge History of the Senses.
Book chapter by: Yijie Huang
By the early eighteenth century, pulse diagnosis had been recognised as a sophisticated medical art in China as well as in Europe. Yet how did individuals from the disparate cultures come to palpate a stranger’s wrist and cope with their idiosyncratic experiences and thoughts?
Yijie’s book chapter, entitled ‘Taking the Pulse between Early Modern China and Europe: The Drifting Touch’, addresses the question by tracing a series of medical encounters at the Qing court and on the transcontinental voyage between the East and the West. It discloses how various participants in these encounters, from the Manchu emperor and his multiethnic courtiers to Chinese surgeons and merchants in the South and European missionaries and diplomats, tried to perceive the other’s pulse through their own culturally informed sense of touch. On that basis, it interrogates how such sensory endeavours created fluid realities of the body, disease, and medicinal objects which, in turn, concealed the sociocultural distinction between their associated ways of experiencing and knowing. In doing so, the chapter tackles critical aspects of the pre-modern global medical exchange beyond the narrative of (in)commensurability, and sheds light on the pivotal role of sensory experience in provoking resonance between practices and negotiating knowledges at a distance.
This book chapter is part of the latest edition of The Routledge History of the Senses, which presents readers with an overview of the field. As well as pointing to directions for the future of the discipline, it illustrates the extent to which the subject offers a considerable space for the exploration of diverse historical topics through the lens of sensory experience.