Telling a patient what is wrong with them on the basis of their pulse alone is an impressive demonstration of medical ability for which Chinese doctors were long famous. This article looks at the early history of Chinese medicine in Europe by examining the encounter between Xu Shizhi who came from China to study for the Catholic priesthood in Naples but became a sensation as a doctor treating the city’s aristocracy and Domenico Cirillo, a prominent physician who encountered him through one of his patients and became interested in Chinese medicine as a result. Although Chinese pulse diagnosis manuals had already been translated into European languages, the sense of touch is impossible to convey in words and this affected how the texts were interpreted. Cirillo, however, met Xu and had the opportunity to learn how to feel the pulse in person. He then combined elements of Chinese medical practice and new vitalist theories of the nervous system to produce a system of his own. His lectures on it were published as the Tractatus de pulsibus and show that his Chineseinfluenced system continued in use in southern Italy well into the nineteenth century. Recent work on the global circulation of medical ideas in the early modern period has focussed on texts, pharmaceuticals and on encounters in colonial spaces. Xu and Cirillo’s story suggests the importance of personal encounter in conveying tacit knowledge as a key part of this circulation.
