By Wendy Yang
What is science? Today, we often picture white lab coats, sterile instruments, and precise formulas—science as a strictly codified discipline. However, science didn’t begin in a lab, and for much of history, it wasn’t even called that. The word science itself is relatively modern. In ancient Greek, science was episteme, meaning simply “knowledge.” The desire to understand the world, to observe, test, and record patterns, is much older and more culturally diverse. It’s scraped from bones, scrawled in blood, and forged in moments of doubt as much as discovery.
As a chemistry student, my days are filled with thinking about molecules, reactions, crafting precise lab reports, and figuring out the best strategies to ace my exams. But science has never felt purely technical to me. Through arts electives such as Philosophy of Science and more recently, an upper-year history seminar on Qing China’s Material and Intellectual Cultures, I have become increasingly interested in how people across time and cultures have defined and pursued knowledge. These experiences challenged the idea of science as a standardized, isolated practice confined to labs and academic institutions. Instead, they revealed it as a cultural phenomenon—messy, interpretive, and deeply embedded in the contexts where it’s practiced. Wanting to explore that further in a creative way, I developed a short visual novel for my final project where you play as a Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 AD) county magistrate investigating mysterious deaths—but as the story unfolds, your own subordinates/coroners begin to sway you, and you end up trying to fake evidence.
Visual novels are interactive stories that blend text and imagery. I chose this medium not only because I enjoy drawing, but also because visual storytelling gives space to explore the messiness and subjectivity of science, especially in historical settings where categories like “science” and “expertise” didn’t exist in the same way. Art helped me show how forensic knowledge was performed, debated, and sometimes manipulated, rather than simply applied.
Qing forensic practices were full of hands-on techniques that might seem strange or even unscientific by today’s standards. But they were built on centuries of empirical observation, most notably compiled in Washing Away of Wrongs (洗冤集录) by Song Ci (1186-1249 AD) during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD)—a foundational forensic manual that made China a global leader in early forensic science. Unlike modern forensic systems that rely on certified medical experts, Qing court examinations were led by magistrates and coroners; the latter were often illiterate. In contrast to the high regard coroners receive today, they were once viewed as unclean and belonged to one of the lowest social classes. Still, they were expected to carry out detailed examinations, using manuals and recorded cases as reference guides.
Autopsies were public events, conducted at the site of death—by the river, on the street, or at someone’s home—not in a morgue. The visibility of the process was part of its credibility. Family members, witnesses, and sometimes random bystanders were encouraged to observe, creating an atmosphere of collective scrutiny. This also meant there wasn’t an “expert culture” in the modern sense. Forensic knowledge was widely used by a diverse range of people: magistrates, clerks, lawyers, and even criminals. Some used it to uncover the truth, others to distort it.
In my visual novel, I illustrated some of the common forensic techniques described in these manuals. There’s the method of steaming a skeleton with wine and vinegar under an oil-cloth umbrella in bright light to reveal hidden bruises or wounds on the bone. Another involves inserting a silver needle into the throat of a corpse to test for poison, usually arsenolites. This works because silver reacts with sulfur impurities in arsenic compounds and turns black. However, decaying bodies also release sulfur-based gases, so the test was notoriously unreliable. My story also incorporates wound analysis—determining the cause and manner of death by examining the shape, size, and depth of injuries—a pattern recognition method still highly relevant in modern forensic science.
This project challenged me to think differently about what counts as science and who gets to practice it. Today, fields like chemistry and medicine often appear universal, standardized, and highly specialized, conducted in isolated settings by trained experts. But in the past, the making of knowledge was often a public, collaborative affair, shaped by overlapping roles, cultural norms, and collective scrutiny. People didn’t always call what they were doing “science,” but they still developed real, reasoned ways of understanding the world. Even the most hands-on, imperfect forensic techniques carried a logic rooted in experience and necessity. Through creative storytelling, I wanted to highlight how scientific reasoning can exist in many forms—and how, historically, it was entangled with other ways of knowing, from law and ritual to art and oral tradition. In some ways, this resonates with today’s growing push for interdisciplinary thinking, reminding us that knowledge doesn’t have to live in disciplinary silos.
Example scenes from my visual novel.
Top left: A silver needle test is performed at the male victim’s deathbed to detect arsenic poisoning. The corpse shows classic signs of poisoning according to Washing Away of Wrongs—cracked tongue and lips, purplish nails, a bluish face, and wide-open eyes.
Top right: A coroner delivers his initial report on the female victim’s fatal wound at the crime scene.
Bottom left: You, the county magistrate, secretly re-examine the body out of suspicion and discover an undocumented skull wound, deliberately ignored by your coroners during the autopsy due to your negligence in supervision.
Bottom right: You, the county magistrate, are summoned to the provincial court, where your superior—the governor—prepares to arrest you for corruption.