Relocating science: Medical missions and Western medicine in nineteenth-century China.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation studies how Western medicine was introduced to China by medical missionaries, in order to understand how scientific knowledge is relocated into another cultural system in which the original organizational settings of the knowledge are absent. During the nineteenth century, it was medical missionaries who brought modern biomedicine to China. Despite initial success, they soon found that their arrangement of affiliating the hospital with the church evoked the resistance of the Chinese. In this dissertation, I analyze how institutional characteristics of knowledge, such as initial conditions of entry, the status of knowledge practitioners, and spatial arrangements of knowledge practice, influence cross-cultural knowledge transmission. I draw mainly upon English- and Chinese-language archival documents, as well as on Qing official publications. I conducted dissertation research in archives located in China, England, and the U.S. I find that more than content, the conditions attached to a new type of knowledge within which it is implemented and consumed during the process of relocation are crucial for the response to it. Because Western medicine was introduced to China by medical missionaries, the combination of the church and the hospital shaped the way in which Western medicine was practiced in China, including the spatial settings of Western medicine, and the agents and legitimacy of the new knowledge. The problem with Western medicine had to do with how it was introduced, and with the almost arbitrary associations that went with it, such as Christianity, lower-class language, lower-class assistants, opium traders, the treaties, and the war. Based on the study of the introduction of Western medicine in nineteenth century China, I develop a general theory of knowledge relocation. Knowledge relocation begins with a cognitive process, translation. Then the new knowledge is put into practical use and its effectiveness tested. Next, legitimation is necessary for the new knowledge to be established in the new cultural context. Legitimation determines who has status and authority and which kinds of knowledge are perceived as valuable and trustworthy in a society. In the end, knowledge relocation ends with a social-cultural process, that whereby the new knowledge is trusted by the general public.