著者

METAILIE Georges

出版者

日本科学史学会

雑誌

Historia scientiarum. Second series : international journal of the History of Science Society of Japan (ISSN:02854821)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.11, no.3, pp.205-217, 2002-03-31

参考文献数

42

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Prior to the eighteeth-century, a similar approach towards the vegetable kingdom, mainly influenced by the tradition of the Chinese pharmacopoeias, could be observed in China and Japan. During the eighteenth-century, the interest for <<Dutch learning>> led some Japanese physicians and interpreters to be more and more interested in Western knowledge about medicinal plants. At the beginning of the nineteenth-century, a few scholars, through direct contact with foreigners or with foreign books, realised that there was a specific scientific field called <<botany>> and began to introduce the Japanese sholarly community to this new science which became one of the subjects taught at the <<University of Tokyo>> in 1877. In China, up to the middle of the nineteenth-century, no trace of modern botany can be found in any published document. In the second half ot the century, a few botanical treatises were published, all being adaptations or translations of Western books, does by foreign-Chinese teams of translators. This situation began to change when Chinese students had the opportunity to go and study abroad, mainly to Japan, at the beginning of the twentieth-century, and, actually, it is between 20 and 30 years later that botany became a real scientific practise in China. We will analyse these two processes, their specificities and their interactions.