ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether, and how, the enormously rich and rewarding biomedical research into the antimalarial efficacy of artemisinin, contained in A. annua plant materials, might be useful for textual scholarship. 1 Admittedly, such a project is fraught with problems, as social historians working with pre-twentieth century medical texts are apprehensive of any attempt to identify the referential meanings of the terms translated. Malaria, for instance, is a modern scientific nosological term for which there is no equivalent in the 2premodern Chinese medical texts. Modern scientists have translated malaria into the Chinese nüeji 瘧疾, which derives from a term that occurs in premodern Chinese texts—just as malaria is derived from premodern terminology, mal’aria ([caused by] bad air). However, neither nüeji nor mal’aria referred to malaria as a disease category in these texts. The premodern Chinese had notions of bing 病 (disorder), hou 候 (conditions, “syndromes”), zheng 證 (evidence, patterns; patterned evidence), and the like, as perceived through the prisms of morality, adhoc (magical) intervention, and legal practice, among others. The premodern Chinese term nüeji was a bing or a hou and not a “disease” in the modern scientific sense. Yet, today, it is used as the standard term into which the biomedical disease category “malaria” is translated.
