In 1683 the Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne published De Acupunctura — the first illustrated European treatise on the Chinese practice, complete with copperplate engravings of acupuncture points. The Public Domain Review collection retells how a seasick samurai’s self-administered needles aboard a ship bound for Edo set a VOC surgeon on a quixotic quest to translate a Chinese manual into Latin.

  • The encounter: on the hofreis — the 1,000-kilometer journey from Nagasaki to the emperor in Edo — an imperial Japanese soldier treated his seasickness by driving four needles into his left abdomen with a small hammer (a Japanese innovation on the roughly 2,000-year-old Chinese tradition); no blood appeared after extraction
  • Ten Rhijne arrived in Japan in 1674, stationed at Dejima — the artificial island off Nagasaki that was the only conduit between Japan and the West until 1854 (the Dutch East India Company took it over after the Portuguese were expelled in 1639)
  • Knowledge flowed both ways: Japanese doctors had eagerly adopted “Caspar-style surgery” from VOC surgeon Caspar Schamberger and studied Dutch texts under the name Kōmō-ryū (“Red-Haired School” surgery)
  • The translation relay: no one on the island could go from Chinese to Latin directly, so Iwanaga Sōko rendered the manual into Japanese, Shōdayū Motogi into Dutch, and ten Rhijne into Latin — “no little accuracy was lost” along the way
  • Qi became a “wind,” an overabundance of which caused swelling needing to be let out — “in the same way, sausages, when they threaten to explode in a heated pan, are pierced”; Galenic humors were mapped imperfectly onto yin and yang as “wet radicals” and “weak primigenial humors”; the charts’ lines were misread as veins
  • The result was more or less unusable as a manual and sparked no European craze — ten Rhijne was even overshadowed by fellow VOC surgeon Engelbert Kaempfer’s more popular 1712 work
  • Still, the essay reads it as “a moment in history when Western medicine was open to the idea of its own partialness”: a surgeon already borrows from carpenters, metalworkers, and tailors — you already have a needle, so why not try something new?

The diagrams are beautiful artifacts of a knowledge system crossing an empire’s trade routes and emerging transformed — a case study in how translation is where meaning gets lost. Ten Rhijne was a remarkably generous reader of a tradition he barely understood: he grasped the mechanics, fumbled the metaphysics, and insisted Europe should pay attention anyway.