The hypothetical mandarin : sympathy, modernity, and Chinese pain / Eric Hayot.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Beginning with Bianchon and Rastignac's discussion of whether the former would, if he could, obtain a European fortune by killing a Chinese mandarin in Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1835), this book traces a series of literary and historical examples in which Chinese life and European sympathy seem to hang in one another's balance. Hayots wide-ranging discussion draws on accounts of torture, on medical case studies, travelers tales, photographs, plasticized corpses, polemical broadsides, watercolors, and on oil paintings. His analyses show that the historical connection between sympathy and humanity, and indeed between sympathy and reality, has tended to refract with a remarkable frequency through the lens called "China," and why the story of the West's Chinese pain goes to the heart of the relation between language and the body and the social experience of the modern human being.

Anecdotal Theory: Edmund Scott, Exact Discourse (1606); Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse (1990) -- The Compassion Trade: Punishment, Costume, Sympathy, 1800-1801 -- The Chinese Body in Pain: American Missionary Medical Care, 1838-1852 -- Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures: The "Coolie" in Late Nineteenth-Century America -- Bertrand Russell's Chinese Eyes; or, Modernism's Double Vision -- Ideologies of the Anesthetic: Acupuncture, Photography, and the Material Image -- Closures: Three Examples in Search of a Conclusion.