The Jesuit missionary of Polish origins, Michael Boym (1612-1659), wrote several books on natural history from Africa to Asia, where he went during his travels. His major work is Flora Sinensis (Vienna, 1656), one of the first European natural history books about China and its region. It contains a collection of visual and written descriptions of plants and animals. In this book, Boym included five fruits that had been transplanted from the Americas to Asia in the sixteenth century, just a few decades before his travels: the pineapple, the guava, the papaya, the custard apple and the cashew. In the seventeenth century, greenhouses did not exist yet, and most of these tropical fruits were known to Europe only by image. I shall discuss how zones with tropical climates functioned as pseudo-greenhouses where, without any intervention, these fruits could be cultivated. I suggest that there is a need to shift our critical gaze to books on early modern botany and differentiate them based on their purposes and what they represent. In Boym’s case, it is possible to sense a complex reality where the availability of transplanted fruits enabled the merging of natural history and geography.

This paper studies accounts of the breath and breathing of fever sufferers in medical sources from the late 1700s to early 1800s across British, French, and Spanish territories. Before the advent of thermometry, which reduced fever to elevated temperature, altered breath and breathing were critical symptoms for diagnosing fever. Although historiography has largely overlooked this aspect, the sources are rich with descriptions of fever sufferers’ quickened breath and their various forms of ‘difficulty breathing’: respiration described as ‘thick and oppressed’; painful breathing, a ‘sighing, or sobbing Respiration’; breathing that is choking, or ‘difficult, longing’; breath interrupted by hiccups; breathing that is ‘quick and small, with a fear and dread […] of making a full inspiration’; and hot, foetid breath ‘offensive’ to bystanders.

The paper seeks to make sense of the fevered breath and feverish breathing. It argues that how the air was taken in and its features as it was expelled from the body were critical signs to be read for fever diagnosis, one of the ‘Motions of Nature’ a physician was expected to observe and gauge its severity, location in taxonomy, or temporal progression. Accounts of feverish breathing are also, however, signs for the historian, the paper holds: to infer that past epoch’s conception and ontology of fever, to help expose the historicity of breathing – a bodily function that may appear timeless, but that is not – and, not least, to offer a window into the anguish, distress, and bodily suffering caused by fever in the past.

In late Renaissance medicine, the process of digestion explained the physiology of metabolism by the body heat, as well as the microstructure of the body in elements and particles. Indeed, food was considered as being decomposed in its first elements by the stomach, and further transformed into humours and body parts by the liver and the venous system. This process depicted the digestive system as an inner kitchen, which transformed food into different types of substances during several stages of cooking or “concoction.” In this paper, I will examine the interpretation of digestion expounded by the French physician Jean Fernel (1497–1558) in his Physiologia (1567). There, Fernel stated the body’s structure into elemental particles, while stressing the role of the “innate heat” as the main agent of physiological processes. In doing so, he shed light on ancient and medieval pre-conceptions of metabolism, especially from Galen’s Natural Faculties, Aristotle’s Meteorology, and Avicenna’s Canon. As will be argued, Fernel’s emphasis on the core elements of the body, as well as their role in the digestive processes of percolation, coagulation, and fermentation, paved the way for chymical accounts of digestion in early modern Europe.

Since the mid-sixteenth century, European sojourners had obtained chances to visit China and encounter its disparate people, regions, and cultures. These encounters have inspired rich scholarship on their profound political, economic and cultural significance to the dynamics of the Sino-European relationship before modernity. Yet much less attention has been paid to the encounters themselves, leaving the essential questions obscure of what months-long eastbound voyages were like, how it felt to tour the vast Ming and Qing territories, and which first-hand observations got to reach the West and how they were received. Some recent studies address these questions by foregrounding muffled agents and events on microscales. As such, they offer critical elements that challenge, revise, and enrich the grand narrative.
Adopting their approaches, this paper focuses on the southern regions of China and explores how their warm climates were involved in shaping the continuity and change of European perceptions of China over the long eighteenth century. A crucial port of call then for most European travellers, these hot, humid regions underlay their knowledge of Chinese medical, natural, and cultural landscapes, with which they navigated ensuing journeys and framed overall understandings of the empire. This paper reads depictions of these regions by contemporary European surgeons, naturalists and merchants comparatively, and discusses how they lived with frequent febrile afflictions in this setting in particular. In so doing, this paper traces the nuanced entanglement of local medical techniques, experiences and ideas, reflecting on its role in catalysing eighteenth-century Europeans’ radically changing views about otherness.