Single Review on past events

Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros is medical doctor, sinologist and historian of science. She masters both East Asian languages (Chinese, Manchu and Japanese) and European languages (Latin, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English). The combination of all these abilities and her keen interest in global history is reflected in her path breaking research. In her presentation on “Ecce Homo: Medicine and Empire in China Under the Rule of the Manchu Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722)” she reflected in the political implications of the penetration of Western medicine in the multiethnic Qing empire.

The Kangxi Emperor was the first of the Qing rulers to be born in the Chinese soil and governed China for 61 years. As New Qing historians have argued, one of the key elements of his success was the establishment of a number of reforms in order to consolidate Manchu identity. First, the emperor sponsored social, political and economic measures to promote the growth of the ethnicities that belonged to the newly defined boundaries of the Qing empire (Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, Turkish, Tibetans, Uighurs, and Kazaks). In a more symbolic dimension the emperor appropriated the various rituals practiced within his empire by constructing different images of his imperial persona that better matched the heterogeneous subjects that he controlled. In such a multiethnic empire it seemed logical that western ideas entered. In fact members of the Society of Jesus during the Kangxi reign established themselves in the very court of the empire by seducing the emperor´s curiosity for Western Sciences.

During her lecture Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros has shown that medicine both in practical and theoretical terms served the emperor’s strategy of contributing to the consolidation of his multiform rulership. Within this framework “Jesuit medicine” was functionalised. For this research, on the one hand, Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros has worked on 8.000 palace memorials including the Chinese and Manchu series (zhouzhe 奏折/wesiburengge), a secret means of communication and control by which the emperor obtained first hand information from the rulers´s “ears and eyes.”

The emperor responded to these memorandum using his vermillion brush (zhubi 朱 批): a unique testimony of the emperor´s intervention in medical practice and his political motivations. The historian has taken as an example cinchona or gingina (in Manchu spelling) [see image 1], the well-known South American drug closely related to Jesuit´s economy that by then was appropriated by the Kangxi emperor and shows how global processes were shaped within the China context. On the other hand she explained that Jesuits at court transmitted Western anatomical knowledge: the Vesalian revolution and newly discoveries on blood circulation by William Harvey´s De motu cordis. The result was the book edition: Dergici toktobuha ge ti ciowan lu bithe (Imperially-Commissioned Complete Record on the Body).

Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros – based on her own translation of the book section: jusei oron i sube sudala be gisurehengge (Nerves and Blood Vessels of the Uterus) [see image 2] – concluded that the emperor became the main sponsor of the whole translation project, but his political and ideological aims turned him also into the main censor: “His aim was to contribute to the existing Chinese medical corpus, but not to create a new one. The emperor, ultimate arbiter who decided what elements of Western Sciences should be incorporated into imperial science decided that “Manchu Anatomy” was neither translated into Chinese nor printed.”

According to Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros Manchu sources provide unparalleled information about the Kangxi Emperor’s personal and personalistic way of ruling beyond the reports available in bureaucratic Chinese sources: “On the one hand they give evidence of the importance of the multiethnic non-Han network of power, on the other hand help us to understand the paradoxically changing policies of the Manchu Kangxi Emperor towards a more sinicised monarch.”