13.06.2025

Yijie Huang: The Drifting Touch and the Multiple Tangibility: Rethinking Pulse Diagnosis between Early Modern China and Europe

Friday, June 27, 2025 13-15 pm, Seminarraum, China Centrum Tübingen(CCT), Hintere Grabenstr. 26, 72070 Tübingen

By the early eighteenth century, the art of pulse diagnosis had reached its respective philosophical and practical sophistication in both China and Europe. Yet how did individuals from disparate cultures interact with each other’s experiences and thoughts when they entered the same pulse-taking encounter? This talk traces a string of cross-cultural medical events at the Qing court and on the transcontinental voyage, in which the Chinese, Manchu, and Europeans, despite possessing wildly different haptic perceptions, attempted to make sense of a stranger’s pulse. In doing so, it uncovers crucial aspects of the pre-modern global medical exchange which were not dominated by the transmission and translation of texts, and sheds light on the hitherto downplayed significance of sensory experience and its fluidity in facilitating acts and conveying ideas across linguistic, geographical, and epistemic barriers. 

Yijie Huang is a postdoctoral researcher in the History Department at the University of Heidelberg. Her main research interests include the histories of medicine, science and the senses in early modern England, as well as medical exchange between Europe and China before 1800. Part of the ERC-funded project “FEVER: Global Histories of (a) Disease, 1750-1840”, she is currently exploring the prevalence of febrile diseases during the long eighteenth century with a focus on the go-betweens across Europe and China and their manifold feverish perceptions. At the same time, she is also transferring her PhD thesis into a monograph. Before joining Heidelberg, she was a Jing Brand Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge. She is the recipient of the Cambridge International Scholarship, and fellowships at the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance, the Huntington Library, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. She received her PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote a thesis on knowledge and practice of the pulse in early modern England.