Benjamin Hobson came to China in 1839 after receiving full training in medicine at University College London, and served for the next twenty years as a medical missionary in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shanghai. He returned to England in 1860 on account of ill health. From 1850 to 1859 he published a series of treatises on western medicine in the Chinese language, the first of its kind in Late Qing China, spanning practically the full range of medicine of the time: anatomy, physiology, surgery, obstetrics, paediatrics, general medicine, and materia medica. He was assisted in this tremendous enterprise by his “Chinese teachers”, notably Wong Ping and Guan Xifu, who were more than amanuensis, taking on in fact an active role in reinterpreting and reformulating Hobson’s missionary medicine for a Chinese audience firmly entrenched in the Confucian intellectual tradition. This paper examines the subtle conflicts, both psychological and cultural, between Hobson and his Chinese assistants, and the ultimate asymmetrical compromise in the new hegemonic formation of scientific knowledge, drawing largely from two draft manuscripts of Hobson’s, Xiyi luelun digao《西醫略論底稿》and Fuying xinshuo《婦嬰新說》, recently discovered and now kept in the Australian National Library.