ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

When Takeuchi Yoshimi Meets Michel Foucault: Shōkei Yakuriron, Doctrine of Signatures, and the Bifurcated ‘Practice Turn’ of Early Modern Europe

• In Event: Beyond Universalisms and Flat Pluralisms: East Asia as Method for the Global History of Science

English Abstract

Some plants resemble certain body parts, and therefore could cure those parts. This ‘Doctrine of Signatures (DOS)’, attributed to sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus, was often dismissed by modern Western physicians as an outdated magic. However, for Japanese Kanpō physician Tatsuno Kazuo, the Doctrine of Signatures was the key to a medical modernity that surpassed the West. Amidst debates in colonial Manchuria regarding the abolition of Kanpō in the 1940s, Tatsuno developed a Shōkei Yakuriron (Visual Resemblance Pharmacological Theory) combining the Western Doctrine of Signatures and Chinese theories of qi, to unify Asian medicine from a higher standpoint than modern biomedicine. For Tatsuno, whether the Paracelsian Doctrine of Signatures was originally magic or science in Western medicine’s timeline was not the important issue at stake. Viewing the DOS as a method in the making rather than a given doctrine, Tatsuno demonstrated that, regardless of its original position on either side of these dichotomies, Japan could bypass them and move the DOS towards a new direction.

This paper draws on Tatsuno’s colonial ambition to provincialise the long-troubling magic-science dichotomies in early modern Europe. Tracing a long history from WWII back to the seventeenth century, it situates the Paracelsian DOS in an early modern era defined in relation to Tatsuno’s pan-Asian medical modernity, rather than the modernity of Western biomedicine. Through the DOS, this paper presents a history of science where universalism and colonialism were fostered not by demarcation but by commensuration. Channelling Takeuchi Yoshimi, it uses East Asia as method to respond to the achievements and frustrations of the ‘practice turn’ in recent historiography of early modern European knowledge: the persistent cursed spirit of ‘scientific revolution’ can only be exorcised together by plural modernities.

Author

• Xinyi Wen, Warburg Institute