ABSTRACT
This study aims to show how medical knowledge circulated between China and Europe in the early modern period; to estimate how it was received; to reveal the difficulties of translating the terminology and their consequences, and finally, to analyse the confrontation between the two types of knowledge; its repercussions on medical practice and its general consequences for history and epistemology. The most important developments happened in the second half of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth century. Since the publication of the first treatises on Chinese medicine in Western languages, they continually aroused interest, so much so that they gave rise to intellectual and doctrinal conflicts between ‘sinophile’ and ‘sinophobe’ physicians. At that time, pulse diagnosis was a recurring question. It would even result in a five-year correspondence (1784–89) between a French and a Chinese practitioner, transmitted thanks to the Jesuits of the French mission in Beijing (Mission Française de Pékin). The texts which mediated these exchanges also constitute a catalogue of the various problems that followed the confrontation between two different systems of body representation, as physicians from across the globe tried to understand one another.
