Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ari Larissa Heinrich is Professor of Chinese Literature and Media at the Australian National University. He is the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Embodied Modernities: Corporeality and Representation in Chinese Cultures.

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"Larissa N. Heinrich deftly weaves a range of materials--including prints, painting, photography, and literature--into a fascinating narrative of the ways visual and linguistic tropes formed and reinforced certain eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western understandings of China. Furthermore, she is attentive to the dialectics of the relationship, especially the way that Western knowledge and ways of seeing shaped certain Chinese concepts about China and its problems, especially in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth."--Stanley K. Abe, author of "Ordinary Images"

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THE Afterlife OF Images

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations.........................................................................................ixAcknowledgments...............................................................................................xiiiIntroduction..................................................................................................11. How China Became the "Cradle of Smallpox": Transformations in Discourse....................................152. The Pathological Body: Lam Qua's Medical Portraiture.......................................................393. The Pathological Empire: Early Medical Photography in China................................................734. "What's Hard for the Eye to See": Anatomical Aesthetics from Benjamin Hobson to Lu Xun.....................113Epilogue: Through the Microscope..............................................................................149Notes.........................................................................................................157Bibliography..................................................................................................197Index.........................................................................................................213

Chapter One

Transformations in Discourse

We often distinguish between the knowledge of the past and that of the modern world.... we could say that ancient falsehoods and modern truths relate to each other like the two revolutions of a single spiral. To be sure the former is smaller than the latter, but they both fall back on society. -Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the World Health Assembly's 1980 declaration that smallpox had been completely eradicated looks naive-even hopelessly so. Not only has the declaration been compromised by the threat of bioterrorism, the narrative conceit of humanism it was grounded on (the romance of man over nature, the desire for an unambiguous resolution) has been severely undermined. The declaration reveals a deep-seated desire on the part of its authors to bring an end to a horrible disease, but it also conceals an impulse to apply narrative closure on a grand scale, to make of smallpox a story with a conclusion (or a conclusion with a story, as the case may be). At least some of the unsettling power of the bioterrorism threat thus goes beyond the material menace of the reeruption of the disease to the substantially troubling symbolic or ideological lack of narrative closure that such a reemergence implies.

From the historiographical perspective, an interesting thing about this anxiety concerning closure in the writing of historical narratives about smallpox is what it suggests, almost incidentally, about the residual relationships between ideology and disease. We may declare smallpox a thing of the past and put that declaration in writing, but the mere threat of its reemergence-the anxiety sans disease-shows that its symbolic and ideological associations, like antibodies, are still present in the historical unconscious. As Bruno Latour notes, "Few diseases obey the fine ordering of irresistible progress that renders them definitively a thing of the 'past.'"

Yet such narratives of anxiety and closure take on even more ideological freight when paired with understandings of premodern China and its historical relationship to disease in the context of global circulation. Here, narratives of disease could be said to exist in a coaxial relationship to narratives of national identity, complicated by both the colonial imperatives that shaped relations between China and the West at this time and the highly contextual scientific fictions that emerged to describe and to determine these relationships. It was in the nineteenth century, for instance, that China became in the popular imagination of the West not only the "Sick Man of Asia" but, more specifically, the "original home of the plague," as well as a perceived source of the cholera in Europe (also known as "the pestilence of the East") and for some-no coincidence-the "cradle of smallpox." At the same time, medical-colonial ideologies of race and national character introduced to China first by medical missionaries in the early 1800s developed simultaneously with anesthetics, antisepsis, germ theory, and, later, concepts of hygiene, so that ideas associating China with various diseases were fused at the symbolic level with narratives of modernity and a sort of scientific neonationalism. Regarding images of the plague, Carol Benedict has noted that "in the eyes of many nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans, plague marked China as a hygienically 'backward' country that continued to incubate a medieval disease in the modern era. For them, plague was yet another indication of the deterioration of the so-called Sick Man of Asia." Conceptualizations of health and hygiene in this formative period thus became thoroughly imbricated with conceptualizations of modernity and vice versa, so that the presence of disease in China-cholera, plague, smallpox-was interpreted both as corresponding to and evidence of a lack of modernity. The legacy of this same discourse can be found in many narratives about SARS and its origins today.

Tracing the ways ideas about smallpox and Chinese identity circulated between China and the West will lay the groundwork for the larger question of what happens when ideas about illness and identity meet ideological imperatives. How were ideas about cultures, and more specifically ideas associating Chinese culture with illness, circulated between China and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? How were sources subsequently used or appropriated and why? And what was the product of this appropriation-what is its legacy for today? Martial Cibot's seminal late eighteenth-century essay "De la petite vrole" ("On Smallpox") provides a window through which we can glimpse some of the attitudes toward inoculation in both France and China at this time. Taking a genealogical approach, I begin this chapter with an investigation into the historical context of the essay's production, examining attitudes toward inoculation in both countries at this time. I then provide a close reading of some of Cibot's more central arguments, a discussion of the Chinese source texts from which they derived (or rather purported to derive), and a look at the initial reception of the manuscript back in France. Finally, I follow the evolution of Cibot's thesis from secondary to primary source for the belief in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American contexts that China was the "cradle of smallpox," or what Latour might call (along with "modern truths") one of "the two revolutions of a single spiral" linking knowledge of the past with that of the modern world.

"Un Homicide de Volont": The Inoculation Controversy in France and the Origins of "De la petite vrole"

I stumbled across ... a letter by Mr. de la Coste in which he speaks of the ingestion or inoculation of smallpox; and I recalled having read something similar in a Chinese book, which led me to transcribe the text of it.... A method closely resembling that which came from...