A Coincidence of Purpose: The Untold Prelude of the Chinese Materia Medica Research at the Peking Union Medical College in 1920

Abstract This paper reconstructs in detail the course leading to the inception of the Chinese material medica (CMM) research at the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) in 1920. By analyzing the primary materials from several archives and provides, it offers, for the first time, a historiographical account of the major events and key figures in the process. These include the China Medical Board (CMB) Commission to East Asia in 1915 that shaped the attitudes of Drs. William H. Welch and Simon Flexner, the PUMC’s chief scientific architects, toward CMM and its scientific investigation; the influence medical missionaries and Japanese scientists on these attitudes; the medical leaders’ decisive roles in recruiting Ralph G. Mills and Bernard E. Read, two medical missionaries with strong interests in and actual studies on CMM, to the PUMC, which serendipitously made them central figures associated with the CMM research at the College; and finally the critical role of Mills and other medical missionaries in introducing CMM research, both concept and material, to the CMB executives and in their reconciliating the research subject with the institutional aims. The findings of the study contextualize the inception of CMM research at PUMC from the perspective of broader narrative of transnational circulation and recognition of medical knowledge and highlight the intermediatory roles played by medical missionaries that were critical in the intersection between traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and scientific medicine. The study also reveals multiple serendipitous occurrences associated with the eventual inception of the program, thus offers a fresh interpretation of the beginning of the most impactful research program of scientizing TCM in the first half of the 20th century.