oa Medical impressions: Print culture and the introduction of Chinese medicine in Western Europe, 1650-1800

This paper presents a research description containing urgent questions and discussions in the field of global book history. It rethinks the crucial impact of new printed media on the early modern European encounter with Asia, and perceptions of these encounters. It proposes to do so through an interdisciplinary study taking on the entangled histories of the burgeoning of print culture and the introduction of Chinese medicine. On one level, this project pioneers the comprehensive study of print culture's influence on the formation and dissemination of non-European medical information, by postulating that early modern print culture was as an engine of change, conveying and altering ideas of Chinese medicine during a period of exceptional transformation and increased global trade, travel, and proselytising, in which the producers of print played a fundamental role. On another level, the project theoretically and methodologically integrates scientific analyses of form and content across and between global cultures, thus charting the process of knowledge transfer in a comprehensive manner and expanding research horizons across fields in historical studies, synthesising perspectives and methods from book history, global history and the history of medicine and science.