The globalization of pipes and smoking in the early modern world is often thought of as a linear movement from the Americas to Africa and Eurasia. While this is true of tobacco smoking, other early modern cultures of smoking (such as the use of cannabis pipes) diffused from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, not from the Americas. This article traces the technological, linguistic, and cultural translations of smoking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the Atlantic world. These movements provoked significant new questions. Early modern smokers (and their critics) grappled with the question of how pipes and other “pyric technologies” of elemental transformation interacted with the body and mind—and with debates about racialized theories of health, long-distance travel, the African slave trade, and the translatability of knowledge and habits.
{"title":"Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire","authors":"Benjamin Breen","doi":"10.1086/719224","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719224","url":null,"abstract":"The globalization of pipes and smoking in the early modern world is often thought of as a linear movement from the Americas to Africa and Eurasia. While this is true of tobacco smoking, other early modern cultures of smoking (such as the use of cannabis pipes) diffused from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, not from the Americas. This article traces the technological, linguistic, and cultural translations of smoking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the Atlantic world. These movements provoked significant new questions. Early modern smokers (and their critics) grappled with the question of how pipes and other “pyric technologies” of elemental transformation interacted with the body and mind—and with debates about racialized theories of health, long-distance travel, the African slave trade, and the translatability of knowledge and habits.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"37 1","pages":"139 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48859067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Cutting deeply into a patient’s body posed a problem for medical deontology in premodern East Asia, defined by the Confucian virtue of “humaneness” and a preference for noninvasive cures. How did Japanese physicians reconcile “humaneness” with their interest in invasive European surgical techniques? This essay offers answers through the tale of Kan (1743–1804) and her physician, Hanaoka Seishū (1760–1835). Inspired by the writings of the German physician Lorenz Heister (1683–1758), Hanaoka attempted to remove a cancerous tumor from Kan’s breast in 1803—the first reliably documented operation of its kind in East Asia. In the process, Hanaoka outlined a new reasoning by which the testing of untested foreign techniques could be construed as “humane.” While scholarship on the translation of European medicine in East Asia has focused on epistemic shifts, I argue that translation was also about the renegotiation of ethical relations, reconfiguring patient-practitioner roles and boundaries of the morally permissible.
{"title":"“Use Me as Your Test!”","authors":"Hansun Hsiung","doi":"10.1086/719230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719230","url":null,"abstract":"Cutting deeply into a patient’s body posed a problem for medical deontology in premodern East Asia, defined by the Confucian virtue of “humaneness” and a preference for noninvasive cures. How did Japanese physicians reconcile “humaneness” with their interest in invasive European surgical techniques? This essay offers answers through the tale of Kan (1743–1804) and her physician, Hanaoka Seishū (1760–1835). Inspired by the writings of the German physician Lorenz Heister (1683–1758), Hanaoka attempted to remove a cancerous tumor from Kan’s breast in 1803—the first reliably documented operation of its kind in East Asia. In the process, Hanaoka outlined a new reasoning by which the testing of untested foreign techniques could be construed as “humane.” While scholarship on the translation of European medicine in East Asia has focused on epistemic shifts, I argue that translation was also about the renegotiation of ethical relations, reconfiguring patient-practitioner roles and boundaries of the morally permissible.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"37 1","pages":"273 - 296"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60725676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the multifaceted approach to the translation of medicine as it appears in the works of Liu Zhi, a seventeenth-century Chinese-Muslim translator from Arabic and Persian into Chinese. Through empire-wide journeys to recover manuscripts, the building of an archive of Arabo-Persian knowledge on the natural world, and the application of various methods to produce coherence, authority, and compatibility with local epistemes, Liu assembled translations that presented early modern Chinese readers with new insights into the structure and operation of the human body. Liu Zhi’s translations provide a rare glimpse into a cross-Asian circulation of knowledge on the human body and add a philological dimension to the premodern knowing of the body.
{"title":"Unveiling Nature","authors":"D. Weil","doi":"10.1086/719220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719220","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the multifaceted approach to the translation of medicine as it appears in the works of Liu Zhi, a seventeenth-century Chinese-Muslim translator from Arabic and Persian into Chinese. Through empire-wide journeys to recover manuscripts, the building of an archive of Arabo-Persian knowledge on the natural world, and the application of various methods to produce coherence, authority, and compatibility with local epistemes, Liu assembled translations that presented early modern Chinese readers with new insights into the structure and operation of the human body. Liu Zhi’s translations provide a rare glimpse into a cross-Asian circulation of knowledge on the human body and add a philological dimension to the premodern knowing of the body.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"37 1","pages":"47 - 66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60725212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Late colonial efforts to articulate witchcraft and herbalism intervened in the precolonial categories of practice through which East Africans differentiated healing (uganga) and harming (uchawi). Taking these interventions as critical points in the genealogy of traditional medicine in Tanzania enables an account of how and why plants have become central to contemporary debates over indigenous knowledge. Developing, promoting, and protecting traditional medicine today requires articulating the properties of plants elucidated by science with the properties of ownership prescribed by modern law. This essay traces the practices of knowing and unknowing that forged traditional medicine in Tanzania and their role in constituting the terms, objects, and institutions through which struggles for justice have been imagined. I argue that the dynamism of traditional medicine as a modern category of knowledge and practice lay in its ability to solve (first colonial and then postcolonial) problems of knowledge and politics simultaneously. Twenty-first-century Tanzanian scientists, healers, herbal producers, policy makers, and patients grapple with these colonial legacies. Yet, traditional medicine has never fully captured the wide range of practices that strive to catalyze growth, fullness, maturation, extension, strength, and fertility. Healing remains unruly, and the friction this creates holds open the possibility of generating alternative forms of the therapeutic value of plants and rendering visible the ongoing forms of (dis)possession that shape notions of justice in late liberalism.
{"title":"Properties of (Dis)Possession","authors":"S. Langwick","doi":"10.1086/714263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/714263","url":null,"abstract":"Late colonial efforts to articulate witchcraft and herbalism intervened in the precolonial categories of practice through which East Africans differentiated healing (uganga) and harming (uchawi). Taking these interventions as critical points in the genealogy of traditional medicine in Tanzania enables an account of how and why plants have become central to contemporary debates over indigenous knowledge. Developing, promoting, and protecting traditional medicine today requires articulating the properties of plants elucidated by science with the properties of ownership prescribed by modern law. This essay traces the practices of knowing and unknowing that forged traditional medicine in Tanzania and their role in constituting the terms, objects, and institutions through which struggles for justice have been imagined. I argue that the dynamism of traditional medicine as a modern category of knowledge and practice lay in its ability to solve (first colonial and then postcolonial) problems of knowledge and politics simultaneously. Twenty-first-century Tanzanian scientists, healers, herbal producers, policy makers, and patients grapple with these colonial legacies. Yet, traditional medicine has never fully captured the wide range of practices that strive to catalyze growth, fullness, maturation, extension, strength, and fertility. Healing remains unruly, and the friction this creates holds open the possibility of generating alternative forms of the therapeutic value of plants and rendering visible the ongoing forms of (dis)possession that shape notions of justice in late liberalism.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"36 1","pages":"284 - 305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/714263","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46302567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The concept of traditional medicine, for all its multifaceted roots, achieved global prominence only during the Cold War era in the wake of massive decolonization. While developments within Asia contributed to this shift, it was often leaders and diplomats from newly independent African countries who first put different aspects of traditional medicine forward for debate within United Nations agencies. The Organization of African Unity (OAU), along with several other pan-African initiatives, paved the way for this work, tying the continent’s cultural heritage to its medical heritage and pushing for its “cultural property” to be protected as intellectual property. These goals were both precedent setting and inherently fraught: they gave states more tacit power to act as gatekeepers for those labeled “traditional healers” (who often referred to themselves by different terms entirely and had ambivalent relationships to state authorities). Diplomats also promoted an ethos that endogenous experts’ “know-how” was a public good and the preserve of governments, rather than private capital. This article reconstructs a central strand in the story of how traditional medicine went global, paying special attention to pan-African networks’ radical foreign policy agendas. These ultimately ensured that global institutions, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), opened their doors to polyglot therapeutics (or different conceptual schemas to define health and illness) and promoted the idea that heterodox healers were integral to people’s rights to health. Though pan-African initiatives were unable to overturn deeply entrenched power imbalances or enact their full agenda, they did have lasting legal, policy, and epistemic effects that continue to reverberate around the world to this day.
{"title":"Traditional Medicine Goes Global","authors":"H. Tilley","doi":"10.1086/714329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/714329","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of traditional medicine, for all its multifaceted roots, achieved global prominence only during the Cold War era in the wake of massive decolonization. While developments within Asia contributed to this shift, it was often leaders and diplomats from newly independent African countries who first put different aspects of traditional medicine forward for debate within United Nations agencies. The Organization of African Unity (OAU), along with several other pan-African initiatives, paved the way for this work, tying the continent’s cultural heritage to its medical heritage and pushing for its “cultural property” to be protected as intellectual property. These goals were both precedent setting and inherently fraught: they gave states more tacit power to act as gatekeepers for those labeled “traditional healers” (who often referred to themselves by different terms entirely and had ambivalent relationships to state authorities). Diplomats also promoted an ethos that endogenous experts’ “know-how” was a public good and the preserve of governments, rather than private capital. This article reconstructs a central strand in the story of how traditional medicine went global, paying special attention to pan-African networks’ radical foreign policy agendas. These ultimately ensured that global institutions, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), opened their doors to polyglot therapeutics (or different conceptual schemas to define health and illness) and promoted the idea that heterodox healers were integral to people’s rights to health. Though pan-African initiatives were unable to overturn deeply entrenched power imbalances or enact their full agenda, they did have lasting legal, policy, and epistemic effects that continue to reverberate around the world to this day.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"36 1","pages":"132 - 159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/714329","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47960871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay takes up questions related to the medical and legal legacies of the trans-atlantic slave trade by examining, within newly sovereign states, the fortunes of ritual experts conversant in matters of health. It asks how these ritual actors in Brazil—where 40 percent of all slaves were sent—framed illness, and compares their frameworks to the legal terms such states used to circumscribe their activities, and what the social consequences were. Instead of approaching this process as an opposition between disease and illness, or the body and its representations, I view these actors’ multiple frames as a window into the way they were “doing” medicine. Their techniques, taken together, allowed them to constitute “the body” in any given healing event, rendering its afflictions thinkable, actionable, and affectively compelling. African-inspired ritual specialists orchestrated complex mises-en-scène of health and cure, achieved in and through ritual doing. This article shows how these techniques came into being and became established; it also explores the conflicts they generated with colonial and nation-state administrators. Two key state regimes in particular were deployed to translate and control Afro-Atlantic ritual techniques: public health and psychiatry. Yet, despite state attempts at the bureaucratic rationalization of medicine, African-inspired healing specialists and their techniques continued to attract a wide clientele across racial groups, serving as a constant challenge to liberal ideas of legal personhood in the process.
{"title":"Translating Spirits","authors":"P. Johnson","doi":"10.1086/713422","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713422","url":null,"abstract":"This essay takes up questions related to the medical and legal legacies of the trans-atlantic slave trade by examining, within newly sovereign states, the fortunes of ritual experts conversant in matters of health. It asks how these ritual actors in Brazil—where 40 percent of all slaves were sent—framed illness, and compares their frameworks to the legal terms such states used to circumscribe their activities, and what the social consequences were. Instead of approaching this process as an opposition between disease and illness, or the body and its representations, I view these actors’ multiple frames as a window into the way they were “doing” medicine. Their techniques, taken together, allowed them to constitute “the body” in any given healing event, rendering its afflictions thinkable, actionable, and affectively compelling. African-inspired ritual specialists orchestrated complex mises-en-scène of health and cure, achieved in and through ritual doing. This article shows how these techniques came into being and became established; it also explores the conflicts they generated with colonial and nation-state administrators. Two key state regimes in particular were deployed to translate and control Afro-Atlantic ritual techniques: public health and psychiatry. Yet, despite state attempts at the bureaucratic rationalization of medicine, African-inspired healing specialists and their techniques continued to attract a wide clientele across racial groups, serving as a constant challenge to liberal ideas of legal personhood in the process.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"36 1","pages":"27 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713422","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44924506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the formation of what Christopher Hamlin has called a “forensic culture” in late nineteenth-century Japan, and its impact on the prosecution of crimes of sexual violence. Before the 1870s, acts of rape often went unpunished or were resolved through private monetary settlements between the victim and her family and the rapist. However, after the formation of the modern Japanese state in 1868, legal reform, an important aspect of the state-building process, created a new opportunity for victims to seek legal redress. Over the course of a decade, an unprecedented number of rapes were prosecuted, with most resulting in convictions and long prison terms for the perpetrators. That situation, however, changed as forensic medicine came to be institutionalized as a specific medical discipline and as part of the criminal justice system. Viewed by the police and jurists as modern, scientific, and rational, forensic medicine created a new standard for what counted as evidence, with the result that the testimony of the victim and others was devalued in favor of traces of blood, semen, and bodily injury—evidence that, as some contemporaries noted, ignored the reality of rape.
{"title":"Sexual Assault and the Evidential Body","authors":"S. Burns","doi":"10.1086/713424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713424","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the formation of what Christopher Hamlin has called a “forensic culture” in late nineteenth-century Japan, and its impact on the prosecution of crimes of sexual violence. Before the 1870s, acts of rape often went unpunished or were resolved through private monetary settlements between the victim and her family and the rapist. However, after the formation of the modern Japanese state in 1868, legal reform, an important aspect of the state-building process, created a new opportunity for victims to seek legal redress. Over the course of a decade, an unprecedented number of rapes were prosecuted, with most resulting in convictions and long prison terms for the perpetrators. That situation, however, changed as forensic medicine came to be institutionalized as a specific medical discipline and as part of the criminal justice system. Viewed by the police and jurists as modern, scientific, and rational, forensic medicine created a new standard for what counted as evidence, with the result that the testimony of the victim and others was devalued in favor of traces of blood, semen, and bodily injury—evidence that, as some contemporaries noted, ignored the reality of rape.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"36 1","pages":"163 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713424","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43047997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This volume ofOsiris takes as its central goal the need to bridge studies of medical cultures, past and present, with studies of the law and legal cultures, encouraging a sustained and historically informed dialogue across all thesefields. It deliberately concentrates most attention on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when medical and legal connections intensified, institutional structures proliferated, and a diverse set of laws and regulations arguably achieved global impact. The field of medical history, for all its accomplishments, still lacks clear and persuasive grand narratives that take all these dynamics into account or that explain their consequences. At the same time, disciplines focused on (bio)medical phenomena today—such as critical global health studies, medical humanities, and science and technology studies—are still insufficiently engaged with the voluminous literature produced by historians, including those focused on science, medicine, and technology. The blind spots this produces matter. Indeed, anyonewho ignores themultifaceted and entangled roots ofmedical and legal phenomena, or believes that the past is irrelevant because recent bioscientific and institutional changes have been so radical and rapid, tends to analyze current trends in ways that are themselvesmisleading. Put simply, disciplinary and professional silos continue to prevent scholars from developing empirically robust and historically nuanced studies of medicine and law on a global scale. This volume offers one path forward. Therapeutic Properties is premised on the idea that boundary work in medical activities has always been mediated and constituted by laws and legal thinking. It
{"title":"Medical Cultures, Therapeutic Properties, and Laws in Global History","authors":"H. Tilley","doi":"10.1086/713990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713990","url":null,"abstract":"This volume ofOsiris takes as its central goal the need to bridge studies of medical cultures, past and present, with studies of the law and legal cultures, encouraging a sustained and historically informed dialogue across all thesefields. It deliberately concentrates most attention on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when medical and legal connections intensified, institutional structures proliferated, and a diverse set of laws and regulations arguably achieved global impact. The field of medical history, for all its accomplishments, still lacks clear and persuasive grand narratives that take all these dynamics into account or that explain their consequences. At the same time, disciplines focused on (bio)medical phenomena today—such as critical global health studies, medical humanities, and science and technology studies—are still insufficiently engaged with the voluminous literature produced by historians, including those focused on science, medicine, and technology. The blind spots this produces matter. Indeed, anyonewho ignores themultifaceted and entangled roots ofmedical and legal phenomena, or believes that the past is irrelevant because recent bioscientific and institutional changes have been so radical and rapid, tends to analyze current trends in ways that are themselvesmisleading. Put simply, disciplinary and professional silos continue to prevent scholars from developing empirically robust and historically nuanced studies of medicine and law on a global scale. This volume offers one path forward. Therapeutic Properties is premised on the idea that boundary work in medical activities has always been mediated and constituted by laws and legal thinking. It","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"36 1","pages":"1 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713990","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48697596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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