scholarly journals “Peruvian balsam”: an example of transoceanic transfer of medicinal knowledge

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Schottenhammer
Keyword(s):  
Modern China ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medicinal Uses ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Spanish Colonies ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
China And Japan ◽  
Archaeological Analysis ◽  
Medicinal Drugs

Abstract Background Connections between China and the new Spanish colonies in America are known for an exchange of silver for silks and porcelains. That also medicinal drugs and medicinal knowledge crossed the Pacific Ocean is hardly known or discussed. Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms (“New World“ or “Peruvian balsam“) is a botanical balsam that has a long history of medicinal use, particularly as antiseptic and for wound healing. Except for a Chinese article discussing the reception of balsam in China and Japan, no scientific studies on its impact in China and Japan and the channels of transfer from the Americas to Asia exist. Methods Description: (1) This section provides a general introduction into Commiphora gileadensis (“Old World” balsam) as a medicinal category and discusses the specific medicinal properties of Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms. The section “Historical research and uses” provides a brief survey on some historical analyses of balsam. Aim, design, setting: (2) Applying a comparative textual and archaeological analysis the article critically examines Chinese and Japanese sources (texts, maps) to show (i) what Chinese and Japanese scholars knew about balsam, (ii) where and how it was used, and (iii) to identify reasons why the “digestion” of knowledge on balsam as a medicinal developed so differently in China and Japan. Results and discussion This chapter discusses the introduction of “Peruvian balsam” into, its uses as a medicinal as well as its scholarly reception in early modern China and Japan and introduces the channels of transmission from Spanish America to Asia. It is shown that Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms was partly a highly valued substance imported from the Americas into China and Japan. But the history of the reception of medicinal knowledge on Peruvian balsam was significantly different in China and Japan. Conclusions In Japan, the knowledge on Myroxylon balsamum was continuously updated, especially through mediation of Dutch physicians; Japanese scholars, doctors and pharmacists possessed a solid knowledge on this balsam, its origin and its medicinal uses. In China, on the contrary, there was no further “digestion” or development of the knowledge on either Myroxylon balsamum (L.) Harms var. pereirae (Royle) Harms or Commiphora gileadensis. By the late nineteenth century, related medicinal and even geographic knowledge had mostly been lost. The interest in “balsam” in late Qing scholarship was pure encyclopaedic and philosophic.

Writing the on-board: Meiji Japan in transit and transition

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Dusinberre
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Global History ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
In Transit

AbstractThis article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.

THE TECTONIC HISTORY OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN BASIN SINCE CHRON 34Y (83 MA)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicky M. Wright ◽  
◽  
Maria Seton ◽  
Simon E. Williams ◽  
R. Dietmar Müller
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Ocean Basin ◽  
Tectonic History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean

‘Homoeopathy flourishes in the far East’: A forgotten history of homeopathy in late nineteenth-century China

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-351
Author(s):  
Di Lu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Far East ◽  
Modern China ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Healing Services

Homeopathy and its transnational transmission have received significant attention from historians of medicine. But the emergence of homeopathy in modern Chinese society has remained little explored. This article identifies the homeopathic practitioners arriving in nineteenth-century China, and then explores their origins, efforts and sense of professional identity in a transnational context. The history of homeopathy in China is found to begin in the late nineteenth century, during which the growth of the Christian missionary enterprise promoted the arrival of sporadic Euro-American homeopathic practitioners, also missionaries, in coastal regions of China. Almost all of them received professional training in American homeopathic medical institutions; and most of them were females, providing additional opportunities for local women patients to receive treatment. The practitioners recognized homeopathy and their collective homeopathic identity, but their healing services were not necessarily essentially homeopathic. Homeopathy that they learnt also evolved and transacted with exotic knowledge during its globalization. Under the influence of homeopathy, some Euro-Americans claimed to have discovered homeopathic elements in Chinese medical ideas and practice. The early history of homeopathy explored in this article helps deconstruct the popular imagination of a coherent ‘Western medicine’ in modern China.

The Pacific Ocean as Highway to Gold Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Sinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Capital Flows ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean

This chapter takes a broad look at the Pacific Ocean in relation to Chinese migration. As trade, consumption and capital flows followed migrants, powerful networks were woven and sustained; in time, the networks fanned across the Pacific from British Columbia along the West Coast of the United States to New Zealand and Australia. The overlapping personal, family, financial and commercial interests of Chinese in California and those in Hong Kong, which provide the focus of this study, energized the connections and kept the Pacific busy and dynamic while shaping the development of regions far beyond its shores. The ocean turned into a highway for Chinese seeking Gold Mountain, marking a new era in the history of South China, California, and the Pacific Ocean itself.

Sailing into the Anthropocene

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Dauvergne
Keyword(s):  
South Pacific ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pacific Island ◽  
The South ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Starting Date ◽  
History Of The South

Chapters 2–6 survey the political and socioeconomic forces underlying the global sustainability crisis. Understanding the scale and depth of contemporary forces of capitalism and consumerism requires a close look at the consequences of imperialism and colonialism on patterns of violence and exploitation. This chapter begins this process of understanding by sketching the history of ecological imperialism after 1600, seeing this as a reasonable starting date for the beginning of what many scholars are now calling the Anthropocene Epoch (or the age of humans, replacing the geologic epoch of the Holocene beginning 12,000 years ago). It opens with Captain Pedro Fernandes de Queirós’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean in 1605–06 to “discover” modern-day Vanuatu, before turning to look more globally at the devastation of imperialism – and later colonialism – for the South Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Over this time conquerors enslaved and murdered large numbers of indigenous people; cataclysmic change came as well, however, from the introduction of European diseases, plants, and animals. This chapter’s survey of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization sets the stage for Chapter 3, which explores the devastating history of the South Pacific island of Nauru after 1798.

scholarly journals Influence of quaternary sea-level variations on a land bird endemic to Pacific atolls

2010 ◽  
Vol 277 (1699) ◽  
pp. 3445-3451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Cibois ◽  
Jean-Claude Thibault ◽  
Eric Pasquet
Keyword(s):  
Sea Level ◽  
Current Trend ◽  
Conservation Priorities ◽  
Last Interglacial ◽  
Quaternary Climate ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Carbonate Islands ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Land Bird

Little is known about the effect of quaternary climate variations on organisms that inhabited carbonate islands of the Pacific Ocean, although it has been suggested that one or several uplifted islands provided shelter for terrestrial birds when sea-level reached its highest. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the history of colonization of the Tuamotu reed-warbler ( Acrocephalus atyphus ) in southeastern Polynesia, and found high genetic structure between the populations of three elevated carbonate islands. Estimates of time since divergence support the hypothesis that these islands acted as refugia during the last interglacial maximum. These findings are particularly important for defining conservation priorities on atolls that endure the current trend of sea-level rise owing to global warming.

Surf Writers of the Resolution and Discovery: Texts, Waves, Politics, and Death at Kealakekua Bay

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Lance Bertelsen
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Journal Entry ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Official History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
First Descriptions

The first descriptions of Hawaiian surfing were written by David Samwell, surgeon of HMS Discovery, and James King, second lieutenant of HMS Resolution, in the months bracketing Captain James Cook’s death at Kealakekua Bay on 14 February 1779. In his journal entry for 22 January, Samwell described Hawaiians surfing six- to seven-foot “alaias” on the “great swell rolling into the Bay,” and in March 1779, King recorded his version of the same event, but neither text was published until 1967. In 1784, King published a significantly revised and expanded version of the scene in the third volume of the official history, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. This skewed chronology has led to some disorientation among historians of surfing, while historians of Cook’s voyages, for the most part, have neglected the surfing episodes altogether. In this essay, I address the descriptions in four interrelated contexts: (1) the history of the texts themselves; (2) their importance to the history of surfing; (3) the significance of the swell occurring during the Makahiki festival; and (4) the emotional and metaphorical impact of the scene on Western observers/writers schooled in the politics of the sublime. In the final two contexts, I suggest the metaphorical and material relationship of the scenes to King’s famous description of Cook’s death in A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean and to Samwell’s equally famous response in A Narrative of the Death of Captain Cook (1786).

scholarly journals The Geological History of the Pacific Ocean*

Nature ◽  
1930 ◽  
Vol 125 (3159) ◽  
pp. 750-751 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. GREGORY
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Geological History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Pacific Ocean

An introductory overview to the concept of displaced terranes

1983 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 994-999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zvi Ben-Avraham ◽  
Amos Nur
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Continental Margins ◽  
Oceanic Plateaus ◽  
Introductory Overview ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Accreted Terranes ◽  
Pacific Margin ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Oceanic Plates

On land much of the Pacific margin is composed of allochthonous terranes, which are of continental and noncontinental origins. In the oceans numerous oceanic rises, some of which are submerged continental fragments, are presently embedded in the oceanic plates. These oceanic rises are probably future accreted terranes. They thus represent one stage in the development of allochthonous terranes found in orogenic zones. Minerals found in these terranes were formed at locations that in the past could have been thousands of kilometres away. This is because some oceanic terranes were split into several parts that moved with their respective plates in different directions. Also, faulting at the continental margins caused large-scale concurrent and post-accretionary horizontal translations of hundreds of kilometres of the allochthonous terranes.Studying the allochthonous terranes may provide important information about the Paleozoic and early Mesozoic history of the Pacific Ocean, because most of the oceanic crust of this age has disappeared leaving only those allochthonous terranes that were once oceanic plateaus within this crust. Understanding the history of the Pacific basin plates and of the allochthonous terranes may lead to the discovery of minerals within the submerged oceanic plateaus.

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