Introduction: Cultural Specificity and the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Expert Knowledge

Abstract

Medicine, as a set of practices and as an intellectual discipline, reflects in intimate detail the culture in which it develops; medicine as a profession necessarily partakes in its host culture’s dominant values. These two insights have been at the heart of recent studies in the history of medicine, and have exposed many previously disregarded factors underlying medical continuity and change. And yet, medical practices and medical knowledge evidently do cross cultural boundaries, despite being rooted in specific understandings of the body determined by their native context. The focus on social construction which has complicated traditional medical narratives about cross-cultural transmission has also directed the historical gaze away from the issues central to that process. Ethnographic and sociological studies of the diffusion of medical innovation, and historical examinations of medicine’s role in the expansion of empire are beginning to address the problem of cross-cultural transmission of medical knowledge. However, this body of work tends to focus on the spread of western ideas, technologies and practices to the non-western world.² Given the massive influx of consumer goods, ideas and technologies into Europe from Asia and the Middle East in the self-perceptions up to a point; I have also adopted the distinction made by several leading proponents of acupuncture between acupuncture which was intended to cure disease and relieve pain and those uses of the needle which had purely physical and local aims.

It is highly probable that a few practical men admitted among them would in a few weeks acquire a mass of information for which if placed in the industrious and active hands of English manufacturers the whole revenue of the Chinese Empire would not be thought sufficient equivalent.¹

Joseph Banks, 1793