Translating Chinese medicine began, for Nigel Wiseman, with a love of language, and it has become a lifelong study of how meaning travels between worlds. His work asks that we stay faithful to what the Chinese actually says, even when it asks something of the reader.
In this conversation, we visit with Nigel and trace the path from a young linguist in early 1980s Taiwan to some of the first English-language texts on Chinese medicine. We look at how terms like “disinhibit” and “deficiency heat” came from refusing to blur distinct concepts, and why a little Chinese goes a long way for any practitioner.
We also explore the Confucian analogies at the heart of the medicine, from the liver as general to the spleen as granary official, and Nigel’s challenge to the idea that Chinese medicine is simply a Daoist art.
Listen in for a discussion on language, metaphor, and translation, and what it means to meet a medicine on its own terms.
You have to get to the core meaning of a term.
Dr. Nigel Wiseman
Nigel Wiseman is a British translator, author, and educator whose work has profoundly shaped how Chinese medicine is studied and taught in English. Born in the United Kingdom in 1954, he earned a degree in German and Spanish from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, then studied Chinese in Taiwan, where his interest in Chinese medicine led him to develop a systematic, linguistically grounded approach to translating Chinese medical terminology.
Dr. Wiseman holds a doctorate in Complementary Health Sciences from the University of Exeter and has authored or translated an extensive body of work spanning classical texts, modern clinical literature, dictionaries, and language-learning materials. His influential titles include A Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine, Fundamentals of Chinese Medicine, Fundamentals of Chinese Acupuncture, Shang Han Lun: On Cold Damage, and Chinese Medical Chinese: Grammar and Vocabulary.
A longtime resident of Taiwan, he has taught Chinese medical studies at Chang Gung Medical University in Taipei. Through decades of careful translation and terminology work, Wiseman has helped English-speaking practitioners, students, and scholars engage more directly with the language, concepts, and classical sources of Chinese medicine.
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