Paul-Hubert Perny's Medical Missionary Activities and the Compilation of Medical Terminology in his French-Chinese Dictionary

From the 1840s to the late 1860s, Paul-Hubert Perny, a French missionary affiliated with the Paris Foreign Mission Society, carried out extensive missionary activities in the provinces of Guizhou and Sichuan. During this period, he actively engaged in Catholic charity by establishing medical schools, training medical students, and opening new clinics. This systematic and large-scale model of medical missionary work achieved notable success. In the following years, Perny gradually shifted his focus to Sinology. While compiling the French-Chinese dictionary Xiyu yihan rumen (西语译汉入门, French-Latin-Chinese Dictionary of the Spoken Mandarin Language), he particularly emphasized the inclusion of medical terminology and drew extensively upon existing translations to determine Chinese medical terms. Simultaneously, he developed his own distinctive translation methodology. The medical terminology in Perny's dictionary not only embodies and perpetuates his missionary vision within the field of sinology but also represents an important contribution to the dissemination Chinese medical terminology in the Francophone world. This, in turn, contributed to the standardization and unification of medical terminology in modern China.