17世纪下半叶，荷兰东印度公司的医生威廉·瑞恩曾经在日本短期旅居，他于1683年出版了拉丁语著作《论关节炎》一书，其中有瑞恩摹绘的4幅铜人图，以及他对针灸技术的详细记述，这两部分内容于1974年以《论针灸》为题发表于英文期刊。这是欧洲第一份详论针灸的文献，其中对针灸理论与技术的记述渗透着瑞恩作为一个深谙欧洲传统与近代医学知识的学者的背景思想，他不仅援用了古希腊医学理论来解读针灸，而且用当时的血液循环理论去印证经络理论。《论针灸》是西方世界对东方针灸的初识，也掺入了欧洲医生对中国医学的想像，其影响延续至今。

In the second half of the 17^th century, Wilhelmi Ten Rhyne, a doctor of the Dutch East India Company, once sojourned shortly in Japan. In his Latin book Dissertatio de Arthritide published in 1863, he provided four meridian-point figures and a comprehensive description of acupuncture technique, which were published in an English journal in 1974 under the title “On Acupuncture”. As the first work discussing acupuncture informatively in Europe, this article’s description of acupuncture theory and technique was penetrated with the distinctive knowledge of Rhyne, a scholar acquainted with both traditional and modern European medical knowledge. In the article, he not only cited ancient Greek medical theories to interpret acupuncture, but also invoked the theory of blood circulation at that time to verify the meridian theory. In “On Acupuncture”, which has been influential since then, we can see both the Westerners’ first acquaintance with Eastern acupuncture and European doctors’ imagination of Chinese medicine.