The Afterlife of Images: Translating the Pathological Body between China and the West (Body, Commodity, Text) - Softcover

Heinrich, Ari Larissa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822341131 ISBN 13: 9780822341130

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

In 1739 China’s emperor authorized the publication of a medical text that included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe, where they were interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chinese. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua collaborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker in the creation of portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies, rendered both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of Western medical prowess. Within China, the visual idiom that the paintings established influenced the development of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images, Ari Larissa Heinrich investigates the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity beginning in the eighteenth century.

Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as “sick” or “diseased.” He also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, through the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese, and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time “scientific” Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings, taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders.

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Ari Larissa Heinrich is Professor of Chinese Literature and Media at the Australian National University. He is the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality and Representation in Chinese Cultures.

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"Larissa N. Heinrich deftly weaves a range of materials--including prints, painting, photography, and literature--into a fascinating narrative of the ways visual and linguistic tropes formed and reinforced certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western understandings of China. Furthermore, she is attentive to the dialectics of the relationship, especially the way that Western knowledge and ways of seeing shaped certain Chinese concepts about China and its problems, especially in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth."--Stanley K. Abe, author of "Ordinary Images"

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THE Afterlife OF Images

Translating the Pathological Body between China and the WestBy Larissa N. Heinrich

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4113-0

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................................................................xiiiIntroduction..................................................................................................11. How China Became the "Cradle of Smallpox": Transformations in Discourse....................................152. The Pathological Body: Lam Qua's Medical Portraiture.......................................................393. The Pathological Empire: Early Medical Photography in China................................................734. "What's Hard for the Eye to See": Anatomical Aesthetics from Benjamin Hobson to Lu Xun.....................113Epilogue: Through the Microscope..............................................................................149Notes.........................................................................................................157Bibliography..................................................................................................197Index.........................................................................................................213

Chapter One

How China Became the "Cradle of Smallpox"

Transformations in Discourse

We often distinguish between the knowledge of the past and that of the modern world.... we could say that ancient falsehoods and modern truths relate to each other like the two revolutions of a single spiral. To be sure the former is smaller than the latter, but they both fall back on society. -Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the World Health Assembly's 1980 declaration that smallpox had been completely eradicated looks naive-even hopelessly so. Not only has the declaration been compromised by the threat of bioterrorism, the narrative conceit of humanism it was grounded on (the romance of man over nature, the desire for an unambiguous resolution) has been severely undermined. The declaration reveals a deep-seated desire on the part of its authors to bring an end to a horrible disease, but it also conceals an impulse to apply narrative closure on a grand scale, to make of smallpox a story with a conclusion (or a conclusion with a story, as the case may be). At least some of the unsettling power of the bioterrorism threat thus goes beyond the material menace of the reeruption of the disease to the substantially troubling symbolic or ideological lack of narrative closure that such a reemergence implies.

From the historiographical perspective, an interesting thing about this anxiety concerning closure in the writing of historical narratives about smallpox is what it suggests, almost incidentally, about the residual relationships between ideology and disease. We may declare smallpox a thing of the past and put that declaration in writing, but the mere threat of its reemergence-the anxiety sans disease-shows that its symbolic and ideological associations, like antibodies, are still present in the historical unconscious. As Bruno Latour notes, "Few diseases obey the fine ordering of irresistible progress that renders them definitively a thing of the 'past.'"

Yet such narratives of anxiety and closure take on even more ideological freight when paired with understandings of premodern China and its historical relationship to disease in the context of global circulation. Here, narratives of disease could be said to exist in a coaxial relationship to narratives of national identity, complicated by both the colonial imperatives that shaped relations between China and the West at this time and the highly contextual scientific fictions that emerged to describe and to determine these relationships. It was in the nineteenth century, for instance, that China became in the popular imagination of the West not only the "Sick Man of Asia" but, more specifically, the "original home of the plague," as well as a perceived source of the cholera in Europe (also known as "the pestilence of the East") and for some-no coincidence-the "cradle of smallpox." At the same time, medical-colonial ideologies of race and national character introduced to China first by medical missionaries in the early 1800s developed simultaneously with anesthetics, antisepsis, germ theory, and, later, concepts of hygiene, so that ideas associating China with various diseases were fused at the symbolic level with narratives of modernity and a sort of scientific neonationalism. Regarding images of the plague, Carol Benedict has noted that "in the eyes of many nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans, plague marked China as a hygienically 'backward' country that continued to incubate a medieval disease in the modern era. For them, plague was yet another indication of the deterioration of the so-called Sick Man of Asia." Conceptualizations of health and hygiene in this formative period thus became thoroughly imbricated with conceptualizations of modernity and vice versa, so that the presence of disease in China-cholera, plague, smallpox-was interpreted both as corresponding to and evidence of a lack of modernity. The legacy of this same discourse can be found in many narratives about SARS and its origins today.

Tracing the ways ideas about smallpox and Chinese identity circulated between China and the West will lay the groundwork for the larger question of what happens when ideas about illness and identity meet ideological imperatives. How were ideas about cultures, and more specifically ideas associating Chinese culture with illness, circulated between China and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How were sources subsequently used or appropriated and why? And what was the product of this appropriation-what is its legacy for today? Martial Cibot's seminal late eighteenth-century essay "De la petite vrole" ("On Smallpox") provides a window through which we can glimpse some of the attitudes toward inoculation in both France and China at this time. Taking a genealogical approach, I begin this chapter with an investigation into the historical context of the essay's production, examining attitudes toward inoculation in both countries at this time. I then provide a close reading of some of Cibot's more central arguments, a discussion of the Chinese source texts from which they derived (or rather purported to derive), and a look at the initial reception of the manuscript back in France. Finally, I follow the evolution of Cibot's thesis from secondary to primary source for the belief in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American contexts that China was the "cradle of smallpox," or what Latour might call (along with "modern truths") one of "the two revolutions of a single spiral" linking knowledge of the past with that of the modern world.

"Un Homicide de Volont": The Inoculation Controversy in France and the Origins of "De la petite vrole"

I stumbled across ... a letter by Mr. de la Coste in which he speaks of the ingestion or inoculation of smallpox; and I recalled having read something similar in a Chinese book, which led me to transcribe the text of it.... A method closely resembling that which came from Constantinople to England was in use for a century in China. -Correspondence of Father Franois Xavier D'Entrecolles, 1726

Many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical and historical discourses of smallpox in China, far from crediting China with the earliest practice of inoculation, identify China as the original source of the disease itself. As James Carrick Moore wrote in 1815, "According to [Jesuit missionary] authorities, medicine appears to have been cultivated, and the Small Pox to have existed in China, from a very remote period.... Several missionaries [also] inform us, that the Chinese worship a goddess, who has a super-intending power over the Small Pox: This is a strong confirmation of the antiquity of that malady in China, which the learned believe to have prevailed there for at least 3,000 years."

Likewise in 1838, Charles Toogood Downing articulated his observation that "the history of the smallpox illustrates in a curious manner the reciprocal benefit which nations derive from each other," tracing a trajectory of the disease that placed its beginning in China. He wrote: "This dreadful malady is supposed to have originated among the Chinese, and to have spread westward in a gradual manner among the natives of Western Asia, until it became as prevalent with the people of Europe, as among those of the Centre Kingdom. The disease then ran its frightful course, unchecked by the ingenuity and resources of man; spreading dismay and horror wherever it appeared, and blighting the loveliness and beauty of the fairest works of the creation." About inoculation practice, Downing added: "As if in some measure to compensate the nations of the west for the dreadful gift which they had bestowed, the Chinese discovered, towards the close of the tenth century, the mitigating effects of inoculation. This practice, by which it was vainly hoped that the original disease might be entirely eradicated, followed the same course, and soon became common as far as the shores of the Atlantic."

In Downing's narrative, the idea that China is the original home of smallpox is compounded by the idea that China is the original home of a failed therapeutic practice as well: inoculation here is characterized not as a successful prophylactic technique but as an unsuccessful attempt to "eradicate" smallpox in order to compensate "the west for the dreadful gift which [the Chinese] had bestowed." Following the invention of vaccination and attempts to promulgate it in China, furthermore, such critiques of the entrenched nature of smallpox in China and the failure of Chinese inoculation practice were increasingly linked to narratives about Chinese refusal to adopt Jennerian vaccination. As Henry Charles Sirr remarked succinctly in 1849, "Smallpox is a great scourge, the natives having a peculiar prejudice against vaccination."

For historiographical purposes, what appears especially interesting about the idea that smallpox originated in China, and to a lesser degree its corollary about the failure of inoculation in spite of the endemic nature of the disease, is that it owed the force of its authority largely to a single document: Father Martial Cibot's short essay "De la petite vrole," which I described briefly in the introduction to this book. Composed in Beijing in the late 1760s, the essay (along with colorful illustrations of children with smallpox) reached Paris around 1772 and was published without illustration seven years later in the collection of proto-Sinological essays Mmoires concernant l'histoire, les sciences, les arts, les moeurs, les usages, etc. des Chinois, par les missionnaires de Pkin (Memoirs on the History, Sciences, Arts, Manners, Customs, etc. of the Chinese, by the Missionaries of Beijing, hereafter referred to as Memoirs). The essay opened with the proclamation that smallpox had existed in China for three thousand years, and it is by this signature that the essay is most often remembered: as the meticulous medical archivists K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh noted in the 1930s, the statement was "often repeated," as well as "ruminated in some quite modern compilations," such that "China was even considered as the cradle of smallpox." A reference to this work even made it within two degrees of separation into the bibliography of Donald Hopkins's 2002 world history The Greatest Killer: Smallpox in History.

Why did Cibot's text prove so enduring? Especially when read against the neutral tone of an essay on inoculation in China composed in 1726 by Father Franois Xavier D'Entrecolles (1664-1741) and later published in Lettres difiantes et curieuses crits des missions trangres par quelques missionaires de la Compagnie de Jesus (Edifying and Curious Letters of Some Missionaries of the Society of Jesus in Foreign Missions), Father Cibot's more well-known essay from nearly a half century later seems strikingly opinionated: not only does it espouse an unambiguously critical orientation toward Chinese medicine in general and inoculation in particular but it does so in remarkably vivid language. Where D'Entrecolles claims only to "transcribe the text" of a Chinese book about inoculation, for example, Cibot asserts that he compiled "On Smallpox" after having read "many very knowledgeable and very boring essays on the origin and the cause of smallpox," including numerous references to the "pathetic stupidity" of Chinese medicine, its "lunacy and inconsistency," and his belief that the history of Chinese medicine was obscured by "clouds of idiocy." Where D'Entrecolles undertakes his report on the premise that knowledge about foreign practices of inoculation could prove useful in Europe, Cibot reserves his most profound critique for the practice, noting at one point the example of a Chinese novice under his supervision who would not practice inoculation on his own patients "even if offered sums of a hundred or two hundred ounces of silver." And even more striking, where D'Entrecolles's report is premised on the idea of commensurability between cultures-inoculation being something that, after all, "closely resembl[es] that which came from Constantinople to England"-Cibot repeatedly emphasizes the impossibility of successfully communicating or "translating" the practice: "Besides making much use of plants that are specific to China, which are rarely used in Europe, [Chinese medicine] reasons on their virtues and qualities according to ideas that pertain to its own systems, its own theory, and consequently in a manner quite different from [that of] European medicine. Given this, how to find a way to make sense of it? Of what use to [Europe] might its most esteemed recipes and remedies be?" Or as Cibot points out elsewhere, "the general system upon which Chinese medicine is based may be ridiculous and absurd, if you will; yet so much is it incorporated into [both] the general and the particular theory of medicine, that all its reasonings are unintelligible if one does not have the key. Thus [as for] the means by which one would go to the trouble of advancing this system overseas, one risks, after having studied it thoroughly, having learned only fantasy." The historian Han Qi has summed up the contrast between D'Entrecolles's and Cibot's texts as follows: "In D'Entrecolles's and Cibot's introductions to the arts of smallpox inoculation [one] can clearly see the differences in their views of Chinese medicine. D'Entrecolles sought to find something useful for Europe in China and introduced with objectivity the possibility of transmitting the Chinese art of inoculation to Europe. But Cibot clearly had biases about Chinese medicine and believed that European medicine was the more reliable." Thus the dramatic difference in tone between the two essays can be explained in part by the changed political and social climate in France at the times the two authors were writing; or as Han Qi remarks all too briefly, "The emergence of such differences in point of view had very much to do with the times."

It is a point well worth elaborating. In the nearly five decades between the writing of the two essays, the debate about inoculation-whether or not the government should endorse it, whether or not it was moral to interfere with a disease that appeared to be the product of divine will-had in fact become a key platform in French Enlightenment discourse. The terms of this debate broke down along lines consistent with Enlightenment concerns, so that while the French royal family and members of the ecclesiastical establishment opposed inoculation on the grounds that interfering with the disease violated the will of God, Enlightenment thinkers for whom inoculation had strong symbolic resonance in a state that could increasingly be characterized not only by its delayed responses to disease and public health but by its sickness or disease at the metaphoric level actively supported it. On the opposition side, smallpox was equated with Job's boils, and consequently the disease was seen "as a punishment of God ... [that] could not be tampered with." Opponents argued further that doctors who performed inoculation risked committing un homicide de volont (deliberate homicide) as opposed to un homicide de fait (de facto homicide, or manslaughter) since inoculation made contracting smallpox a certainty when it could have remained only a possibility without the interference of the doctor. According to yet another argument, inoculation as a practice was suspect due to the morally dubious circumstances of its foreign origin. By contrast, arguments in favor of inoculation emphasized not only the potential prophylactic benefits of the practice but also Enlightenment concerns about individual choice versus state and religious intervention. Voltaire, for instance, argued that the question of whether or not to practice inoculation was a matter of individual choice and should not be subject to state or religious jurisdiction. While freedom to practice inoculation therefore embodied Enlightenment ideals about free will, the French state's opposition to inoculation came to represent to Enlightenment thinkers a lapse back into darkness, a self-destructive impulse that both literally and figuratively worsened the "sickness" of France.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822341131
• ISBN 13: 9780822341130
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar