A Study On Missionaries’ Translation And Introduction Of Traditional Chinese Medicine In Modern China

Research objectives:The group of missionaries played the role of bridge in modern Chinese and western medical communication, which has received great attention recent years. Literature shows that studies on missionaries’transmission of western medicine into China are abundant, while their activities of translating and introducing traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) into the western world have not been cultivated fully enough. This study, taking modern Chinese society as the historical background, missionaries’translation and introduction of TCM as research subject, attempts to summarize and classify their activities and based on which, to analyze the motivation, characteristics, enhancing and hindering factors, influence and its enlightenment on contemporary cross-cultural TCM communication, with the hope to provide new perspective for perceiving missionary’s role in medical communication between China and western world.Research methods:literature method and descriptive method are adopted mainly in this study. By literature method, related materials and information are collected, concerning social background, general information about missionary, their translation and introduction of TCM and so on. By descriptive method, missionary’s translating and introducing activities are demonstrated in detail, highlighting the activities’enhancing and hindering factors and its influence to the western world. Descriptive method includes synchronic and diachronic description, the former focusing on activities in certain period while the latter on changes of the activities in different periods.Research content:Taking modern Chinese society as the historical background, missionary’s translation and introduction activities of TCM as research subject, this study tries to comb, analyze and classify the materials collected into eight types:translation and introduction of TCM as a whole, of acupuncture and moxibustion, of Chinese materia medica, of forensic medicine, of Chinese anatomy, of Chinese health cultivation, of history of Chinese medicine, of other aspects of TCM. Based on the analyzes above, discussions about the reasons for the missionary to carry out these activities, features and affecting factors of these activities, their influence on the western world and inspiration to contemporary TCM communication are made respectively.Conclusions:1. Findings show that missionary carried out the translation and introduction activities of TCM out of four reasons:exploring Chinese medical resources, enhancing the preaching work of religion, making up the deficiency of western medicine, yielding to the magic therapeutic effect of TCM.2. The features of their activities can be embodied in two aspects:more introduction of TCM than translation and aids from Chinese doctors and scholars.3. The enhancing factor for their activities is the improved quality of missionary and the hindering factor is the contradiction between TCM study and religion preaching, and also the language and culture difference.4. The positive influence of these activities is their impact on TCM communication, western medical development, western sinology study and modern translation study; the negative influence of these activities is their impact on misinterpretation of TCM in western world because of missionary’s misunderstanding of TCM.5. These activities shed light on contemporary TCM communication, such as changing from passive output to active output, determining output content on the base of western needs, improving TCM confidence, strengthening TCM theory communication and so on.6. To study missionaries, detailed historical facts and objective perspectives are necessary. On the one hand, they introduced advanced western medicine into China and TCM into western world, making it possible for Chinese science and civilization participating the whole world’s development and scientific progress; on the other hand, the religious nature of missionaries colors their comprehension of oriental and western science and transmission effect, with a certain degree of limitation.