Translating the Inner Landscape

Abstract

The translation of European anatomical treatises is widely considered one of the pivotal processes of early modern Japanese history, introducing new ways of understanding the body and new styles of visual representation, as well as serving to launch the broader intellectual movement of “Dutch Studies” (rangaku 蘭学). In this article, I consider how anatomical knowledge and anatomical translations were integrated into the medical thinking of Japanese doctors whose understandings of the body continued to be informed by older East Asian traditions of medical knowledge. In contrast to the rangaku translators, who developed a novel anatomical lexicon in order to faithfully reproduce the meanings of European source texts, early nineteenth-century practitioners of Sino-Japanese medicine, including Kako Ranshū, Mitani Boku, and Ishizaka Sōtetsu, described the anatomical body using the language of the Chinese medical classics. At the same time, they used new understandings of the body from European anatomy to solve long-standing problems in the interpretation of those classics, identifying specific anatomical structures in the digestive system corresponding to the “triple burner” (C. sanjiao, J. sanshō 三焦) and reimagining the body’s conduits for the circulation of blood and qi and the targets of acupuncture in terms of the veins, arteries, and nerves.