2 - Discovering Diseases: Research on the Globalization of Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century China

Summary

In 1869, Dr. Alexander R. Jamieson, a medical officer of Shanghai Customs Station, suggested to Sir Robert Hart (1834–1911), the inspector-general of Chinese Imperial Customs, that the customs establishment should take advantage of its unique position to collect information about the diseases of foreigners and natives in China. Hart then issued a circular on December 31, 1870, to the commissioners of customs at all treaty ports, in which he invited the medical officers and medical missionaries of the various ports to investigate the general health and disease prevalence at their ports for the observation of local peculiarities of diseases, especially those diseases that were rarely or never encountered anywhere outside of China. Hart reasoned: “If carried out to the extent hoped for, the scheme may prove highly useful to the medical profession both in China and at home, and to the public generally.” On September 11, 1871, the first issue of the Medical Reports was published in Shanghai at Hart's order, which was the first of eighty volumes published over the next forty years with hundreds of reports from China, Hong Kong, and Korea as well as Japan. They provided an abundance of data that offers historians a largely untapped resource for research on medicine and public health in nineteenth-century China and Asia. By presenting the scope of the Medical Reports, this chapter demonstrates that research activities related to the biomedical discovery of diseases began in nineteenth-century China and Asia and should be considered a significant episode in the narrative of the spread of Western medicine. In particular, it demonstrates the role of medical officers of the Maritime Customs Service and medical missionaries in promoting the globalization of scientific medical knowledge by establishing a standard of classification for investigating epidemic diseases not only in China and Asia more generally, but also in Europe and Africa.

The present chapter will explore why the customs service was organized and why it issued medical reports, in addition to the relationship between these; and also how foreign medical officers and medical missionaries discovered and identified the diseases that they had never encountered anywhere else.