A Dutch doctor translated acupuncture through four languages
Ten Rhijne was living at Dejima, the artificial island off Nagasaki that was the only piece of Japan open to Europeans during the Edo period. He first watched the procedure on a ship, when a seasick imperial soldier treated himself with four jabs into the left side of his abdomen, tapping the needle in with a hammer because, ten Rhijne wrote, "his skin was rather tough." The man recovered. He wanted the technique explained in Latin, and found a Chinese acupuncture manual on the island.
- ▪Ten Rhijne was living at Dejima, the artificial island off Nagasaki that was the only piece of Japan open to Europeans during the Edo period.
- ▪He first watched the procedure on a ship, when a seasick imperial soldier treated himself with four jabs into the left side of his abdomen, tapping the needle in with a hammer because, ten Rhijne wrote, "his skin was rather tough." The man
- ▪He wanted the technique explained in Latin, and found a Chinese acupuncture manual on the island.
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Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/08/07/de-acupunctura-1683.html |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T12:50:45.791Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T12:50:45.791Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -a1dHjFYsSMI · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A Dutch doctor translated acupuncture through four languages Popkin 5:30 am Fri Aug 7, 2026 De Acupunctura — Copperplate engraving of acupuncture points from Willem ten Rhijne's De Acupunctura (1683), Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de santé / public domain worldwide, digital copy Etalab Open Licence (via The Public Domain Review) De Acupunctura is a 1683 book by the Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne, and it came out of one of the most roundabout translation jobs on record. Ten Rhijne was living at Dejima, the artificial island off Nagasaki that was the only piece of Japan open to Europeans during the Edo period.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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