When I entered the field of the History of Science in China in 2005, I was aware of Needham's works, not by reading the SCC directly, but by reading the scholarship produced in the so-called post-Needham era. This scholarship, starting from the eighties, reevaluates and critiques Needham's works, especially on his famous question about Chinese science, often referred to as the "Needham question." So what is the Needham question? Here is a quote from his 1943 draft on the SCC project:
"Why, therefore, did modern science, i.e. our theoretical body of scientific thought, universally applicable to nature and commanding universal assent, develop in west Europe, not in China"
A big red question mark follows.
Immediately after, Needham speculated the answer:
"answer: social and economic background requires investigation"
This is the core of Needham's historiographical orientation; he intended to find the answer, through the production of the SCC, to this fundamental question: Why did China fail to develop modern science, given all her glorious achievements in the pre-modern era?
Later scholars, some of whom were collaborators of Needham, started to challenge this grand question. They argued, under the influence of post-modernism, that it is problematic to use modern science as a universal criterion to measure Chinese science. Since the latter operates in a drastically different philosophical and cosmological system, it is better to study it in its own historical and cultural context. This alternative approach, which may be labelled as cultural relativism, is my entry point to the History of Science.
This is not the place to adjudicate whether Needham was right or his critics, though generally I am more comfortable with the latter group. I plan to write another piece on this issue using Edward Wilson's book Consilience as a jumping board. So readers, if you are interested, wait for some time.
Back to the NRI. After Needham's death in 1995, it has continued to be an important research site, equipped with an excellent library, for scholars in the field. Since I came to the UK, I have visited it three times, participating in its seminars and checking books in the library. Today is the fourth time, and my task is to check some research material Needham gathered over the years for the pharmacology section of the SCC. Although they are not essential for my own work, it would be fun to read Needham's notes and letters, paying my due tribute to this magnificent man. Moreover, I might gain a more nuanced understanding of Needham and his works after reading his archives.
So what did I find? The first one that caught my attention is a letter Needham wrote in 1968 to Dr. Storen, a toxicologist in Western Germany, about lead poisoning in China. Dr. Storen cited S. Colum Gilfillan's work, which argued that lead poisoning in ancient Rome, through the pipe system, was responsible for the decline of Roman civilisation and the rise of men of genius (this later became a book with a telling title: Rome's Ruin by Lead Poison). The argument, typical at the time, has a strong technological deterministic touch (Marxism was in its full force). Dr. Storen asked Needham whether he found a similar phenomenon in China. In Needham's response, he first confirmed that lead was plentifully used in ancient China and Chinese was aware of its detrimental effect. He then showed his hesitancy to embrace Gilfillan's argument, since he "should be very disinclined to attribute either the 'decay of Rome and other Mediterranean civilisations', or the appearance of men of genius in them, to any one such single factor as chronic lead poisoning." Any historian these days would agree with him. And lastly Needham stated, and this is the fun part, "The idea that 'genius' might have been missing in Chinese culture is for us simply laughable." Whether Needham misunderstood Gilfillan, I don't know, though I wouldn't be surprised that Gilfillan's argument had Eurocentric sensitivities, a dominant scholarly orientation at the time. We may say, therefore, that one of the most significant contributions of Needham's project is to put Chinese science on the table for serious scholarly inquiry, not anymore as a culture at worst hopelessly backward and at best exotically enticing. Remember, when Needham started the SCC project, he was working against the tide. Half a century passed, and now we take for granted that the history of Chinese science is a legitimate and important branch of knowledge pursuit. For this, we solute to Needham. [On the other hand, we ought not to over-glorify Needham's achievements since his works are also imbued with political agendas, as any piece of historical writing. His leftist worldview and his close relation with the Chinese government found testimonies in his works. But this will await another entry to elaborate.]
Now let's move to another piece of Needham's material. This time we find a note he wrote about two alchemical recipes including his calculation of the amounts of chemical components therein. The note itself is not very special; it must be one of the many that Needham used to produce his work on the history of Chinese chemistry and alchemy, one of his favorite subjects. But let's flip the paper over, and see what is on the other side: it is a book review published on the newspaper The Observer in 1959. The review, titled "From Marx to Freud," is on the book Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman Brown. Suddenly I felt that I bumped into an old friend, since I read several chapters of this book a few years ago in my advisor's class. It is obvious that Freud's influence on humanities studies was immense in the fifties: This book is all about using Freud's psychoanalytical approach to study history. I wonder whether Needham ever paid attention to this review when he wrote Chinese alchemical recipes on the other side of the paper. If so, what did he think? [It would be interesting to explore Freud's impact on Needham's works, if there is any.]
A third piece, this time a clip from the magazine Times in 1976, kept in Needham's pharmacology folder. The title of article: Psychology: Poison theory in Salem witch hunt. If you check my previous records in this blog, you will find an entry I wrote in the summer of 2011 about my visit to Salem and a bit of history on the notorious witch hunt. Now the question is: What was the real reason for those young girls who turned mad overnight? It could be simply a joke, staged by these not-so-innocent children so perfectly. But the article proposed a different explanation, grounded on material base: those children ate molded bread that was infected by ergot, a type of fungus. The report, based on a recent research published in the journal Science, summarized the major scientific evident that supported the explanation. So now we have travelled from the fifties, when psychoanalysis was in its prime, to the seventies, when the focus turned to the material base of our mental process. This turn became more definitive from the eighties, when brain science replaced Freud's approach for studying psychology at least in natural science. Having this fascinating article in his folder, Needham was probably thinking whether the same explanation could be applied to Chinese case. The article states revealingly: "A puzzling feature of the Salem trials has been the vividness of the testimony, which is hard to explain if, as is now widely believed, the witnesses' tales were fictional. That could be accounted for if they were in fact describing the symptoms of poisoning." Hallucination, witchcraft, poisoning. Whether this connection is convincing or not, it is certainly arresting.
If we continue fumbling Needham's folders, another interesting letter emerged. This is a letter written in 1973 to Needham by the historian Donald Wagner, who was in Kyoto at the time. In the letter, Wagner asked some specific questions about a paper that Needham presented in a Daoist Studies conference in the previous year. In particular, he mentioned a plant called Rauwolfia 萝芙木, a medicine used as a tranquilizer and anti-hypertensive. Wagner pondered why this plant medicine was not included in Chinese pharmacopoeia. And here is Wagner's explanation, based on his knowledge that Rauwolfia could cause serious side effects:
"It seems that one of the great problems in the introduction of modern medicine in many parts of the world is that modern therapies often have unpleasant side-effects like these, while traditional therapies generally do not. It might easily be that the compiler of a pharmacopoeia was careful to exclude cures which he felt were worse than the disease."
This comment speaks directly to my research topic, which is the history of Chinese pharmacology and toxicology. Does Chinese medicine have no side effects? I doubt it. All drugs are thirty percent toxic, a Chinese saying claims. Another goes: If a drug does not make the patient feel dizzy [a sign of its potency and toxicity], it cannot cure the severe illness 药不瞑眩 厥疾弗瘳. Medicines and poisons are intertwined in Chinese medical culture, from its early stage. For one example, mercury is included as one of the good medicines in the earliest Chinese pharmacopoeia Shennong bencao jing 神農本草經, even if its toxicity is fully acknowledged. Taking a recent example, Chinese medicines containing aristolochic acid (AA) 馬兜鈴酸 was banned in Europe and the US because some scientific research showed its connection to kidney cancer. This generated a heated debate between practitioners on Chinese medicine and the scientific community, which is yet to be settled. All I want to say is that it is not so easy to separate medicines from poisons. Chinese pharmacological tradition, as modern medicine, not only acknowledges that, but tries to put that concept into best use in practice. How Chinese doctors did this is what I am going to study in the following years.
Leaving the topic of drug/poison behind, now let's go to the last page of the last folder I checked today. It is a folder containing notes or articles on the biographies of Chinese doctors. This last page is simply a file title, that is, Biographies or 傳. But below this title, I found another title -- 祝由, which was later crossed out. Why did Needham place biographies and incantations together? More curiously, why did he cross out the latter, presumably an afterthought? Any person who is interested in Needham's general historiography would be interested in this. One likely explanation is that Needham initially established the category, trying to find some material interesting, but eventually he didn't find any, or to be more exact, anything that fit in his framework. Recently I talked to a professor at Cambridge, who when he was a student fumbled through Needham's material, just as what I did. To his surprise, he did not find anything on Chinese zoology. As he thought more, he found it not so surprising: Chinese accounts of animals are full of strange creatures and mythical figures, which Needham must find hard to correspond to biological species in western science. Better to leave them alone. The same logic can apply to Needham's attitude to incantation, a topic I myself am quite interested in.
Anyway, it is about time to stop this long piece. I believe this is my first experience of reading archival sources. For a student studying the History of Chinese Science, nothing seems more fitful than starting with Needham's material. Certainly it was enjoyable to read them especially when unexpected connections popped up from time to time. As I walked out of the NRI, I saw the burial site of Needham's ashes, together with those of his two wives, under a beautiful tree. The idea is quite oriental, I shall say. That is, to bury ashes under a tree so that the dead starts to live again in this new form of life. Life continues in such perennial transformations. If Needham ever believed the existence of soul, his soul is certainly manifested in this robust and luxuriant tree.
