Where is an Elephant’s Gallbladder? The Ideas of Animal Anatomy in Early Modern China

This article revisits the supposed absence of animal anatomy in early modern China through a focused case study of the “wandering” elephant gallbladder. It begins with a 1730 report by the Jesuit Dominique Parrenin to the French Académie des Sciences on a Kangxi court dissection of an elephant, in which the gallbladder was said to migrate seasonally within the animal, switching between the legs. By juxtaposing Parrenin’s correspondence with European scientists over whether elephants possess a gallbladder at all, the article reconstructs a shared yet divergent landscape in comparative anatomy in China and Europe. To elucidate the rationale behind this anecdote, this paper traces the longstanding discourse on animal viscera in materia medica , medical books, and in formal and unofficial historical records. It then examines how Chinese physicians and veterinarians used animal dissections primarily to authorize drugs and to think through cosmological and moral questions – the association, for example, of the gallbladder with courage, the application of Five Phases and zodiac schemes to explain why some species “lack” organs, and the notion that only the human body is structurally complete. The article argues that, rather than indicating indifference to animal bodies, the scattered records on elephant gallbladders and equine viscera reveal a distinct Chinese style of animal anatomy: one embedded in practical dissection, numerology, and the meridian models, and that was premised on a strong homology between human and animal bodies. This perspective both complicates narratives of Chinese “anatomical backwardness” and enriches the global history of comparative anatomy

Animal life · China · Comparative anatomy · History of China · History of medicine · Human body · Narrative · Perspective (graphical · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Philosophy and Science · History of Medicine Studies