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Traditional Chinese Knowledge before the Japanese Discovery of Western Science in Gabor Lukacs’ Kaitai Shinsho & Geka Sōden
- Author(s):
- Grégoire Espesset (see profile)
- Date:
- 2014
- Group(s):
- History, Medical Humanities, Science Studies and the History of Science
- Subject(s):
- Medicine--Philosophy, Medicine, History, Middle Ages, Sixteenth century, Seventeenth century, Science, Manuscripts, China, Japan
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- surgery, physiology, anatomy, Philosophy and medicine, History of medicine, Medieval and early modern medicine, History of science, Manuscript studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/hj04-n898
- Abstract:
- Gabor Lukacs' 2008 book on “Kaitai Shinsho: The Single Most Famous Japanese Book of Medicine & Geka Sōden: An Early Very Important Manuscript on Surgery” is a bibliographical contribution to the comparative history of the introduction of Western science in East Asia. It focuses on two illustrated manuals of anatomy and surgery in Japanese, adapted from European medical sources in Dutch. This review article first surveys the organisation and contents of the book, then tackles consistency, typesetting and copyediting issues, then moves on to problems with transcriptions and translations of Chinese and Sino-Japanese materials, and finally discusses Lukacs' approach to Chinese premodern knowledge. Richly illustrated yet mainly descriptive, pervaded with amateurish enthusiasm, ideological biases and value judgments, the book illustrates the persistence of ‘Orientalism’ and ‘exoticism’ in academic publications.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 4 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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