WANG, Shuhe, [ed. BOYM, Michał], ed. CLEYER, Andreas.

First edition of this beautifully illustrated collection of works of Chinese medicine, assembled by the Polish Jesuit missionary Michał Boym (c.1612-59) and plagiarised by the editor Andreas Cleyer (1634-c.97), chief physician to the Dutch East India Company. Most of the work is on circulatory physiology and the diagnostic uses of the pulse, the first being by the second century AD Chinese physician Wang Shuhe and the second excerpted from the ancient Chinese medical text called Huangi Neijing or ‘Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor.’ Intersected with the latter are Boym’s own observations on the Chinese system of diagnosis through the pulse. Shuhe’s work contains woodcuts providing diagrammatic representations of various pulse rhythms, while Boym provides tables from the Inner Canon giving the number of breaths and the corresponding beat of the pulse according to both Chinese and European time. Another tract by Shuhe describes herbal medicines to be used in conjunction with diagnosis through the pulse, giving their Chinese names and describing each one. The thirty striking etchings are reproductions of Chinese anatomical illustrations depicting the circulatory system in its entirety and also the specific channels by which the major organs communicate with the head, as well as the major organs themselves. There is also an illustration of the correct method for taking a pulse and another of hands showing the three pulse locations on the wrist. A final tract on diagnosis according to the colour of the tongue is illustrated with thirty-six annotated woodcut diagrams.

Michał Boym was born in Lviv, then Poland, and joined the Jesuits at Krakow before travelling as a missionary to China in 1643. He was one of the first westerners to travel extensively in China and produced a series of maps of the regions as well as Chinese flora. ‘These works, which were sent by Father Philippe Couplet (1623-93) to Batavia in 1658 for transportation to Europe, were, because of the disdain of the Dutch East India Company for the Jesuits, deprived of the name of their author … The plagiarising editor added to it some pieces translated from Chinese, probably by [Boym], which had not been sent from Canton until 1669 and 1670. He had published some part of these tracts two years previously as smaller works’ (Sommervogel).