Protestant (medical) missionaries were the main proponents of Western medicine in China after the Opium Wars. Several studies have highlighted how they used spectacular surgery as a means of gaining public trust. As well as surgery, they also administered anthelmintic drugs such as santonin as a tool of persuasion and conversion. Many anthelmintic drugs of the European materia medica had a colonial history. My paper analyses how coloniality materialised in medical practice and anthelmintics in China. For the late nineteenth century, I will examine the colonial practices in which the drug santonin was involved. At the time, santonin was the drug of choice for treating roundworm. In the early twentieth century, medical missionaries became involved in parasitological research on parasitic worms such as hookworm and Fasciolopsis buski. For this period, I will explore how new knowledge about anthelmintics emerged in the scattered knowledge space of China, and how it related to colonialism and imperialism.

Before World War II, Taiwan became the second-largest coca leaf production base in Asia, second only to Java, contributing to Japan's position as the world's largest exporter of cocaine. While Japan's opium empire has been the subject of extensive academic inquiry, its coca empire has received far less attention. This article explores Taiwan's role in Japan's dual empire of opium and coca, focusing on the environmental and historical factors that enabled the island to rapidly expand coca production. It finds that, in addition to Taiwan's favorable climate for coca cultivation, the island's long-established tea industry provided mature techniques for harvesting and drying the coca leaves. Furthermore, the sugar company supplied the necessary equipment and capital for the extraction of cocaine, becoming a key resource in the industry's development. Learning from the limitations of the opium monopoly-where raw materials were increasingly constrained by international markets-the colonial government sought to promote self-sufficiency in coca production. This strategy not only ensured a stable supply of raw materials but also allowed the coca industry to balance for the declining incomes from opium as international controls tightened. From all angles, the coca industry met Japan's expectations as a "promising drug."

The Western world has a profound historical engagement with medicinal resources originating from China. Following the Opium War, missionaries were granted access to China and established residence there. Motivated by clinical necessities and the inquisitiveness of the Western scientific community, these missionaries meticulously documented the medicinal resources available in China, endeavoring to incorporate this knowledge into Western pharmacology. Among the various reports produced in multiple languages, the contributions in English have emerged as particularly influential. This article seeks to analyze the information-gathering processes within the missionary network and among other naturalists, commencing with Robert Morrison, the inaugural compiler of the English-Chinese dictionary, and extending to Stephen A. Hunter, who collaborated with Chinese officials to develop a complete translation for pharmaceutical nomenclature.

This paper was prompted by some striking similarities between both the ritual and the medical use of placenta in Ming China and in premodern Europe. Contrary to most accounts, which focus either on the rise of chemiatric medicine or on the growing interest in "exotic" substances, the seventeenth century in Europe also reveals a revived interest in substances from animals, including materials from human bodies. The paper will analyse the use of words signifying the placenta, and follow the trace of vernacular knowledge about the placenta and its role in birth-giving, and in medieval medical texts on women's medicine. I will then analyse how the placenta is treated in systems of signatures in the age of alchemy and will try to trace the advent of more complicated preparations in the seventeenth century, and how between the eighteenth and the twenty-first century, the placenta meandered between a token of folk medicine (re)productive material and pharmaceutical resource.

This study explores materiality and material cultures of human placenta in Ming China (1368-1644), for it perfectly displays Chinese ambiguous attitudes towards the human body parts between living and non-living. For a long time, the Chinese had widely applied human body parts in medical treatments and ritual healings. Numerous evidences in relation to their collection, production, efficacy and application are widely recorded in medical works, in particular those found in materia medica. In the sixteenth century, the Bencao gangmu (Systemic Materia Medica, 1596) illustrates thirty-five "human body drugs." Of those, the placenta was believed effective for curing illnesses, nourishing the body and prolonging life. The questions to be answered include: how is the placenta perceived in medical and religious discourses? What is its "materiality" and "efficacy" when it becomes a drug? What ethical issues and moral concerns are involved with eating the placenta? Last but not least, how was the placenta ritually buried after childbirth in premodern China? In so doing, this essay aims to provide a better understanding of the placenta situated in both material and cosmological worlds. It helps us rethink the multiple relations of human body part to part, part to whole, and body to body.

By unravelling the complexities and dynamics of a collaboration between scientists in India and West Germany to establish a cryogenic network, this paper intends to contribute to our understanding of the transnational movement of research technologies during the Cold War. In 1971, a cryogenic laboratory including a helium and a nitrogen liquefier was set up at the physics department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras as part of the Indo-German partnership at IIT Madras between 1959 and 1974. As a generic research technology with many applications, cryogenics became crucial for a solid state research agenda for semiconductor development. After initial difficulties, Ramaswami Srinivasan at IIT Madras and Gustav Klipping of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin built a successful collaboration based on mutual trust and on Indian and German scientists travelling and working in each other's laboratories. If the initial motivation of the Indo-German partnership was informed by the logic of Cold War development policy, Klipping and Srinivasan developed their collaboration into a vibrant cryogenic research network around different actors, instruments, and skills moving between India and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Humans and donkeys have had a closely interactive relationship throughout history, despite being two completely different species. How has Chinese society viewed the donkey in its long history? How have donkeys been used? And what kind of boundaries do people place on the donkey? This study has focused on the consumption of donkey in Chinese history from medical, cultural and legal aspects. All in all, considering food, medicine, and legal viewpoints, from the medieval period to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the question whether or not one should consume donkey depended on its characteristics, taste, texture, and the side effects, as well as whether the manner of consumption is consistent with social moral standards and its derived legal boundary issues.

Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, left unfinished in 1929, has attracted significant interest in recent decades. This essay offers a new interpretation of Warburg's "picture atlas," not in relation to modernist collage and photomontage, but as an heir to scientific pedagogical exhibitions of the late Wilhelmine period. It deals in particular with two "public enlightenment" shows curated by the Leipzig medical historian Karl Sudhoff, whose work Warburg admired and employed: the first on with the history of hygiene in Dresden in 1911, the second in Leipzig, three years later, on the development of scientific images. Like Warburg, Sudhoff appreciated artworks and artifacts as sources for the history of science and medicine. His exhibitions consisted of assemblages of photographic reproductions-some of which were provided by Warburg himself-and uncannily anticipate Mnemosyne in both form and content. By examining the exchange of materials and display methods between the two scholars, the article explores how their respective visual projects reflected deeper disagreements over the public role of science, the epistemic power of images, and the persistence of the irrational in the human psyche.

This special issue presents six research papers that were developed within the Taiwanese-German working group "Materialities of Medical Cultures in/between Europe and East Asia." Our working group uses the concept of "in/between" as an umbrella term to study the cultural history of drugs and the practices of medicine and care. This issue's articles address the question of how drugs and medical knowledge emerged from the various in/between spaces created by encounters between East Asian and European medical cultures. Their focus is on the entanglements of matters and knowledge in the contexts of mission and colonialism, the production of medicinal substances and helminthology, as well as on premodern knowledge cultures concerning childbirth and the preparation and consumption of animals with a medicinal background. The contributions present a comparative perspective on material and knowledge cultures surrounding medical materials from plants, animals, and humans. In this introduction, we summarize the discussions within our Taiwan-German working group as case studies on how scholars of East Asian and European studies can meet under the "in/between" umbrella term as a productive approach to an interdisciplinary and comparative history of knowledge.

Monasteries were famous for their extensive libraries and richly decorated churches. Less well known are their observatories and their mathematical-physical collections with telescopes, air pumps, and friction machines. But how did the way of life in the monastery and scientific practices influence each other? This paper examines the interaction of scientific practices and religious way of life using the example of southern German monasteries in the second half of the eighteenth century. It shows how the monks pragmatically linked monastic life and research practice, thereby forming their own specific scientific culture. This closes an important gap in the understanding of scholarship in the eighteenth century by foregrounding the monasteries as places of knowledge production, which have so far received little attention alongside universities and academies.

This paper offers a reconstruction of the interpretations of Descartes's ideas of place and motion by Dutch Cartesians (Henricus Regius, Johannes de Raey, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich). It does so by focusing on the reading of Descartes's Principia philosophiae (1644) offered, in particular, by the dictated commentaries on it. It is shown how such commentaries bring to the light new potential Aristotelian-Scholastic sources of Descartes, and the different ways Dutch Cartesians brought to the fore, also with the help of such sources, the rationale of the Cartesian text: in doing so, they constituted a philosophical school.

Understanding physicians as actors who implemented the early modern ideal of collective empiricism into their practices within the local contexts of everyday life, the paper explores two cases from imperial cities in southern Germany in the 1720s and 1780s in which anatomical studies were contested. By analyzing the strategies and arguments that the two physicians used to justify and continue their anatomical dissections, it focuses on their references to different kinds of (local) community and relates these references to another type of collective: membership in a scientific academy. To examine references to community, it is proposed, offers an opportunity to better understand the spread and practice of the ideal of the study of nature as a collective project and how it was intertwined with concepts and structures of order and society in the Holy Roman Empire.