ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The needle and the skin: Willem ten Rhijne and surgical encounters between Europe and Asia

• In Event: European Surgeons Across the Early Modern World: Itineracy, Knowledge, and Practice

English Abstract

The Dutch medical practitioner Willem ten Rhijne (1647–1700) spent nearly three decades in East and Southeast Asia as an employee of the Dutch East India Company. He was stationed in Batavia, Japan, and Sumatra, and produced a series of works that addressed the medical and surgical practices he witnessed in Asia. Through his writings concerning the skin, such as those on acupuncture and leprosy, this paper illustrates how the body’s surface became a site of encounter between European and Asian surgical and medical frameworks. The forms of knowledge ten Rhijne was exposed to in these settings provided him with new ways of reading the skin as well as conceiving the engagement with the skin. Acupuncture, with its deliberate perforation of the skin and controlled use of the needle, shaped his understanding of the practice through the perspective of European surgery. When confronted with an outbreak of leprosy in Batavia, he drew on descriptive terms for physical signs used by Chinese and Malay residents to aid his observation on skin lesions. The attention to the relationship between the skin and body’s interior also informed his evaluation of external remedies from different medical cultures to treat leprosy.

Author

• Wenrui Zhao, University of Utah