Medical knowledge, representations of illness and health, and diagnostic and therapeutic practices in the Chinese world intrigued, to varying degrees, the Portuguese Jesuits who reached Japan as early as the seventeenth century, then the Jesuits of the China Mission and the doctors of the Dutch East India Company in the eighteenth century, and finally the European scientists, diplomats, and soldiers who visited the Far East in the nineteenth century. More generally, as we know, the same was true of agriculture (or agronomy), botany, the art of gardening, architecture, porcelain, zoology, etc. These contacts resulted in numerous texts presenting these various “Chinese techniques and sciences,” the nature, status, and scope of which varied considerably depending on the informant and the period (Barnes Citation2005; Bivins Citation1999).
