Practice versus Doctrine in Cross-Cultural Knowledge Transfer: The Reception of Western Medicine in Nineteenth-Century China

Abstract

This paper examines the phenomenon of cross-cultural knowledge transfer, particularly the reception of Western medicine introduced by Protestant medical missionaries in nineteenth-century China. The sociology of scientific knowledge argues that knowledge is local, where trust of new knowledge is based on the preexisting social order. This paper studies how new medical knowledge was accepted in a cultural system that did not have the original institutional or cultural supports needed to validate that knowledge. I distinguish between knowledge as doctrine and knowledge in practice and examine these two aspects during the relocation from one cultural context to another. To do this, I focus on a historical example: why medical missionaries were able to attract large numbers of Chinese patients even though Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine held incommensurable doctrines. I argue that when they combined Western medicine and Christianity, missionaries accidentally practiced a type of medicine that resembled preexisting medical practices in China. The similarities lie in five aspects: the diversity of medical practitioners, the combination of medicine and religion, the idea of medicine as magic, the doctor-patient relationship, and the treatment space. I conclude that the crucial factor for the response to a new type of knowledge is the practice of that knowledge against the social context within which it is relocated, rather than its doctrines.