Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea

Jurgen Kovacs, Paul U Unschuld

University of California Press, £46, pp 515

ISBN0520080580

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This is the first English translation of a classic 15th century text on Chinese ophthalmology. Its very title warns us that we are stepping from the solid shores of the exact sciences into speculative waters, into a parallel world sustained by a sequence of analogues and origins, fantasies and metaphors, where all our comfortable realities become shifting and insubstantial. We are left with a galaxy of theories and attributions, which are …