Chinese Medicine, Western Medicine and Confucianism: Japanese State Medicine and the Knowledge Cosmopolis of Early Modern East Asia

Abstract

This article argues thatChinese state intellectual approaches to medicine significantly influenced theinstitutional reception of Western medicine in early modern Japan.Confucian-inspired general reforms of government in late eighteenth centuryJapan encouraged an increase in state medical intervention, including theintroduction of Western medical practices, achieved primarily through the useof transnational Confucian intellectual knowledge apparatuses. Through asociology of knowledge approach, this article analyzes the links betweenearlier private sphere Chinese medical practice, late Chinese imperial stateideas on medicine, and early modern state-led medical Westernization in Japan.The article highlights the role of trans-Asian Confucian ideas, networks andpractices in mediating new approaches to technical innovation, including thosefrom the West. The position for Confucianism argued in the article therebyresonates with Bayly’s idea of the early modern information order of India, andPollock and Ricci’s idea of cosmopolitan discursive spaces in other parts ofAsia