Abstract:

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.

Key words: Wilhelmi Ten Rhyne, “On Acupuncture”, meridian-point figure, text interpretation