HIST 8940

This story map has a small selection of premodern Chinese and Japanese volumes that are part of the  Wangensteen Historical Library 's collections. You can see many more of our premodern East Asian books and scrolls on  U-Media .

Japanese acupuncture charts represent the uses of Chinese medical theory throughout East Asia in the early modern period. Below are two acupuncture charts in a set of four printed in Japan in 1661. Check out the other two in  U-Media .

Some texts in the Wangensteen vividly show the kinds of information that moved between East Asia and Europe, and how that information was transformed in the process. Below is one page of a flap anatomy from mid-Edo Japan. The work is anonymous and undated, but we, with lots of help, have determined that it was produced after Johannes Remmelin's flap anatomies. Interestingly, although many of the images and flaps are directly inspired by Remmelin's works, the theory represented in the volume is thoroughly Chinese. Read more about this interesting book in this  Thinking 3D blog post . We've been working on a project to animate this flap anatomy, and you can see a  screen recording of it now .

For comparison, see one of Remmelin's flap anatomy pages here.

About this resource

This Story Map was created in March 2020 in order to deliver digital content to HIST 8940 at the University of Minnesota during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Because in-person class meetings were cancelled, we assembled a variety of resources that would have been used during a class visit to the Wangensteen. See more of the Wangensteen's digitized premodern East Asian materials at  umedia.lib.umn.edu .

We chose to use Story Maps because of its ability to function on laptops and mobile devices.