Translation at Work

During the first period of globalization medical ideas and practices originating in China became entangled in the medical activities of other places, sometimes at long distances. They produced effects through processes of alteration once known as translatio, meaning movements in place, status, and meaning. The contributors to this volume examine occasions when intermediaries responded creatively to aspects of Chinese medicine, whether by trying to pass them on or to draw on them in furtherance of their own interests. Practitioners in Japan, at the imperial court, and in early and late Enlightenment Europe therefore responded to translations creatively, sometimes attempting to build bridges of understanding that often collapsed but left innovation in their wake.

Contributors are Marta Hanson, Gianna Pomata, Beatriz Puente-Ballesteros, Wei Yu Wayne Tan, Margaret Garber, Daniel Trambaiolo, and Motoichi Terada.


Winner of the J. Worth Estes Prize 2021 awarded by the American Association for the History of Medicine:

Beatriz Puentes-Ballesteros, “Chocolate in China: Interweaving cultural histories of an imperfectly connected world,” in Harold Cook (ed.), Translation at Word: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age (Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2020).