By James Flowers
It is with deep sadness that we convey the news of the passing of our IASTAM Advisory Board member, Natalie Köhle. Natalie fell ill in early 2024, meaning she could not make it to ICTAM in Taipei. We hoped she would recover, but she left us on September 9, 2024, in Sydney, Australia. She had only recently taken up her position at the University of Sydney as Lecturer in the history of Chinese medicine. Before her illness, she was working on two book projects. One was the global history of Chinese ‘phlegm,’ and the other was the history of the Chinese drug, donkey hide gelatin. Natalie earned a BA. Hons at SOAS, and an MA and PhD at Harvard. She is gone far too early. We will miss her.
Natalie Köhle was born and grew up in Stuttgart, Germany. After graduating in Bachelor studies at SOAS, London, she began her doctoral studies in Harvard University. She trained with several well-known historians, including Shigehisa Kuriyama and Mark Elliott. During this time, she also spent research time in Taiwan, where she met her future husband, Huang Bin. Following graduation as a PhD in 2015, her 2016, her next move was to Australian National University in Canberra as a postdoc. In 2019, she became assistant professor in Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2023, she returned to Australia, taking up a new appointment as lecturer in History of Chinese Medicine, in the School of History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Natalie published two significant ground-breaking articles. In A Confluence of Humors: Āyurvedic Concepts of Digestion and the History of Chinese Phlegm (2016), Natalie examines Chinese and Sanskrit-language sources to investigate the relationship of the Chinese medicine and phlegm and Indic influences. In The Many Colors of Excrement: Galen and the History of Chinese Phlegm (2023), Natalie challenges assumptions in the field by convincingly arguing that the modern Chinese adage that “all sickness arises from phlegm” drew on the Galenic medicine concept that “all sickness arises in humors.”
Together with Shigehisa Kuriyama, her principal advisor at Harvard, Natalie also co-edited the online monograph, Fluid Matter(s): Flow and Transformation in the History of the Body (2020). Her final contribution in the Comparative Guts edited volume (2024), “Anatomical Images in Northern Song China,” also pushed the hitherto boundaries of knowledge.
In her personal life, Natalie fell in love with Australia on her first stint there as a postdoc. She was excited to get the opportunity to return in 2020 with her appointment to the University of Sydney. However, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that she and her husband, Huang Bin, were locked in Hong Kong until 2023. The tragedy is that only months after finally settling into her new job in Sydney and even buying a house with Bin, she fell ill with a devastating diagnosis of cervical cancer. Even more tragically, the doctors diagnosed her too late, after weeks of severe pain in which the cancer metastasized to many parts of her body. She was admitted to hospital on the day of the settlement of her house purchase. She passed away on September 9 alongside her loving husband, Bin, and her loving mother, Ulla.
In this obituary, we are including brief tributes from some people who knew Natalie.
Liu Yan, State University of Buffalo New York: “I am deeply saddened to hear the passing of Natalie, a wonderful colleague and genuine friend. A gifted scholar with a broad vision and the courage and capacity to tackle some of the most challenging and meaningful problems in the study of Asian medicine, she had been developing a career that was set to be illustrious and impactful yet was regrettably cut too short. She is still palpably present and will be sorely missed.”
Angelika Messner, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel: “It is with sadness I now look back to nearly 11 years of friendship with Natalie. Her research covers both the conceptual history of science and medicine as well as the history of pharmacology, the cultural history and ethnography of the production and consumption of traditional Chinese medicinal drugs. Natalie’s research projects were a contemporary history of donkey hide gelatin, and a global history of phlegm. Her work on donkey hide gelatine – a cultural history of the production and consumption of a traditional Chinese medicinal drug that is made from donkey skin – is squarely addressing ethical issues in science and medicine. I was supposed to serve as PI in this research project.”
Marta Hanson: “Natalie’s first article conclusively demonstrates through the long-durée history of one of the major concepts in post-classical Chinese medicine – tan 痰 phlegm – that during the early medieval period (2nd-6th c CE) Chinese translators accurately understood Āyurvedic medical concepts from Indic sources and transformed thereafter how phlegm was understood and so treated in Chinese medicine. She was able to do this not only because of her gift in languages (native German, classical Chinese, and classical Sanskrit) and superlative philological training but also, and as important, her training in the history of ancient Greek and Roman medicine (especially Galenic medicine), of Āyurvedic medicine, and of Chinese medicine. Her second article is even more impressive as she successfully demonstrated that Galenic medicine entered China through the work of a relatively obscure Chinese medical scholar who wrote an otherwise little-known Yuan dynasty treatise in 1338 titled On the Art of Nourishing Life. This treatise thereafter fundamentally changed how Chinese understood the material body and the nature of disease.”
Michael Stanley-Baker, Nanyang Technological University: “While visiting Singapore for another presentation, Natalie kindly arranged to come to Nanyang Technological University to present her work. With surgical precision she unfolded the history of phlegm within Chinese medicine, laying out a meticulous argument of an undocumented transition that took place in the fourteenth century. She showed clear evidence of the influence of Galenic ideas, even though her sources mentioned no contact with any Turkic doctors from abroad. Drawing on Latin, Greek and Sanskrit sources and a vast range of scholarship to make her case, she dared to read beyond her primary sources, triangulating across them to show a clear continuity of ideas. A rare scholar, with grit and precision, she was just getting her feet under her as an established scholar, and clearly had so much to offer us all, scholars and students alike.”
Daniel Spigelman, University of Sydney: “When I first met Natalie, I was immediately struck by not only her extraordinary intellect, but also by her relentless inquisitiveness and most of all her humility. As a supervisor she was incredibly supportive and warm-hearted. On a personal note, she helped me greatly in getting my head around many of the unspoken customs of academia and provided incredibly valuable direction in my research. I hope to help continue much of the work she started and help make her vision of the future of Chinese medicine in Australia and the world a reality. I will be forever grateful for having known her, and she will forever be in my thoughts and prayers.”
James Flowers, Kyung Hee University: “We lost a dear colleague, and I lost a dear friend. Natalie made me laugh a lot. We shared the idea that scholarship is fun, bringing the greatest joy that can be had. In her final days, she told me how much she loved our community and how she dearly wished she could continue to participate. I am so sorry, Natalie, that you are gone, but your laugh, your spirit, and your love of the embodiment of scholarly inquiry will always stay in our hearts.”