The Needle Transfixed: Ten Rhyne, Kaempfer and the European Gaze

Abstract

Despite his sensitivity to trends in British medicine, Sir John Floyer’s 1701 prediction that Chinese medicine would be as popular in Britain as Chinese silks and tea proved over-hasty. Medical treatment was clearly a consumer good in this period, and was as much subject to the whims of its consumers as any other product in the eighteenth-century marketplace; yet in some integral way, Chinese medicine differed from tea and silk, china and lacquer-ware.³ The exotic was less appealing in the sickroom than in the coffeehouse or at the breakfast table. In addition, information about Chinese medicine diffused through Britain far more slowly than did Chinese consumer goods. Thus, Dr Gillan of the Macartney mission shared neither Floyer’s enthusiasm for the pulse nor his broad awareness of Chinese medical practice and theory; however, he and his companions of every rank did hold strong opinions and preferences about their tea. Notwithstanding an additional ninety years of western contact with China and Chinese medicine, Gillan lacked even a name for the medical technique he witnessed in Ho-Shen’s chambers. Only Staunton’s descriptions of the tools employed in the operation confirm its identity as acupuncture: The operation had been frequently performed, and many deep punctures made with gold and silver needles (which two metals only are admissible for the purpose).’⁴

I suppose my readers will be pleas’d to practice according to the Chinese mode, as well as to adorn their houses with their curious manufactures, and to use their diet of Thea.²

Sir John Fl oyer, 1701

The orthographic abandon with which eighteenth-century authors treated proper nouns meant that at least two and often multiple accepted spellings existed for the names of foreign places and individuals. Thus, the man I have chosen to call Wilhelm Ten Rhyne, following the title page of his Dissertation de Arthritide, was also called Ten Rhijne and ten Rhyne, while the De Arthritide is catalogued in the British Library under the surname Rhyne. Similarly, Kaempfer has also been Kempfer, Kemper, Kämpfer and Kaempfer. Chinese and Japanese names for both places and people were even more liberally varied, and I have generally left them in the form which the authors of each text used — noting their shared referent in places where wildly deviating spellings might obscure it. Western transliterations of Chinese medical terms have in some cases rendered the original terms untraceable, even through context-clues.