Making Zheng Experimental: Conceptual Continuity in Chinese Hypertension Research

How is a scientific object’s historical continuity formed when it must be produced anew in experimentation? This article follows zheng, a concept used in Chinese medical diagnosis and treatment, through hypertension research in Shanghai from the late 1950s to 1962. Clinical judgments guided treatment and established distinctions that pathological staging and physiological tests could not fully explain. Reactivity of the organism offered a way to investigate states shaped by earlier influences and manifested in later responses. In animal experiments, differing and changing responses to medicinal formulas, interpreted in light of their established therapeutic meanings, provided grounds for recognising and following zheng. Researchers then brought animals from different pathological models together as “animals with kidney yin deficiency”. This judgment guided further functional investigations, whose findings gave the type new bodily content and further constrained how it could be understood. I call the historically formed determinacy that made earlier judgments consequential for later inquiry an object’s “contour”. The case shows how these normative constraints became productive as researchers reorganised established therapeutic relations in experiments, allowing new findings to count as knowledge of zheng. The continuity of zheng from clinical practice into experimentation was itself formed through this process.