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Creative Misunderstandings: Chinese Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Harold J. Cook

in Cultures in Motion

This chapter examines how “creative misunderstandings” can travel by focusing on how Chinese medical ideas and practices were perceived in seventeenth-century Europe. It first considers one example ... More

This chapter examines how “creative misunderstandings” can travel by focusing on how Chinese medical ideas and practices were perceived in seventeenth-century Europe. It first considers one example of a European response to East Asian medical ideas: Sir John Floyer's advocacy for his new method of diagnosing disease from counting the beats of the pulse as well as his defense of Chinese medicine. It then discusses a number of texts and travels through which observations of Chinese sensing of the mo came into the ken of early modern medical innovators like Floyer. In particular, it analyzes Michel Boym's Clavis Medica ad Chinarum Doctrinam de Pulsibus and Andreas Cleyer's Specimen Medicinae Sinicaet. The chapter also looks at Floyer's translation and reinterpretation of passages from the Specimen that William Wotton had attacked in print, sparking a debate between the two men.Less

 The Creation and Evolution of Qigong

David Ownby

in Falun Gong and the Future of China

This chapter traces the invention and evolution of qigong, the larger movement out of which Falun Gong emerged in 1992. Qigong was created as part of a nativist Chinese reaction to the importation of ... More

This chapter traces the invention and evolution of qigong, the larger movement out of which Falun Gong emerged in 1992. Qigong was created as part of a nativist Chinese reaction to the importation of Western biomedicine in the 1950s, with the goal of protecting and preserving traditional Chinese healing practices—often linked in imperial times to religious and spiritual beliefs. Qigong functioned on a small scale within specialized clinics and sanatoriums linked to Traditional Chinese Medicine in the 1950s and early 1960s, but was severely criticized as “feudal superstition” during the Cultural Revolution and thus largely disappeared. Qigong re‐emerged in the mid‐1970s in the public parks of Beijing, taught by independent masters who had healed themselves and promised to heal others. When qi was “proven” by Chinese researchers to have a scientific existence in the late 1970s, Chinese authorities gave their approval to qigong, thus paving the way for the qigong boom. Qigong superstars such as Yan Xin and Zhang Hongbao became national celebrities and attracted millions of followers in the first popularly led mass movement in China since 1949.Less

Chinese and Western Medicine in Hong Kong: Some Social and Cultural Determinants of Variation, Interaction and Change: (1975)*

Marjorie Topley

Jean DeBernardi (ed.)

in Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

The anthropologist Raymond Firth points out that the observer is faced with the problem of accounting not only for continuity but also change. This chapter adapted this conceptual framework to its ... More

The anthropologist Raymond Firth points out that the observer is faced with the problem of accounting not only for continuity but also change. This chapter adapted this conceptual framework to its analysis. Firth uses it for the analysis of social behavior; but decisions and choices are cognitive events. One might also talk of a cognitive system, and of cognitive structure and organization: the norms people use in classifying and ordering concepts, and the ideas they are able to form on the basis of these norms—the variations possible. The chapter looks at some of these norms and variations in order to understand some aspects of social change and the importance of this change. It examines the official social structures devised for Chinese medicine and Western medicine, the main social and cultural factors which appear to have determined this divergence, and its significance for the people.Less

Science as a Verb:: Scientizing Chinese Medicine and the Rise of Mongrel Medicine

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

Based on the discovery that it was the Nationalist state that popularized the project of “scientizing Chinese medicine” by establishing the Institute of National Medicine in 1931, Chapter 7 analyzes ... More

Based on the discovery that it was the Nationalist state that popularized the project of “scientizing Chinese medicine” by establishing the Institute of National Medicine in 1931, Chapter 7 analyzes two related developments. First, as an ideological tool, this project allowed Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu to reconcile the conflict between scientism and cultural nationalism for the Nationalist party. Second, as a vision for medical syncretism, it represented a decisive break from the pre-modern conception of “converging Chinese and Western medicine.” Because this project required traditional practitioners to take science seriously, it gave birth to a new and hybrid medicine, which came to be stigmatized by its opponents as a “mongrel medicine.” To document the emergence of this new medicine, this chapter examines how this project of “scientizing Chinese medicine” motivated, gave shape to, and at the same denied the possibility of such a species of “mongrel medicine.”Less

Epistemological Issues and Changing Legitimation: Traditional Chinese Medicine in the Twentieth Century

Charles Leslie and Allan Young

in Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge

In China, the social ideology supporting the social system of the Imperial age constituted epistemological root, that is, the legitimizing context of traditional medicine. This chapter discusses the ... More

In China, the social ideology supporting the social system of the Imperial age constituted epistemological root, that is, the legitimizing context of traditional medicine. This chapter discusses the epistemological issues and changing legitimation of traditional Chinese medicine. With the breakdown of the traditional social structure, and with the demise of the traditional social ideologies supporting the Imperial age, and with the attempts to supply a new ideological basis to a changing social structure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese medicine lost its legitimizing environment. However, the body of knowledge identified as Chinese medicine today emerged as a result of fundamental changes in the social ideology and social structure of China at the beginning of the Imperial age. Its basically unchanged stability over exactly two millennia resulted from an unparalleled permanence of its legitimizing sociopolitical context during this time.Less

Introduction

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

Chapter 1 introduces the central puzzle of the book: How was Chinese medicine transformed from an antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol for China’s exploration ... More

Chapter 1 introduces the central puzzle of the book: How was Chinese medicine transformed from an antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol for China’s exploration of its own modernity half a century later? To answer this question, this book strives to go beyond the conventional framework of dual history, that is, a clear-cut separation between the modern history of Chinese medicine and that of Western medicine in China. Far from being a “remnant” of pre-modern China, Chinese medicine co-evolved with Western medicine and the Nationalist state, undergoing a profound transformation that qualified it to be recognized as modern Chinese Medicine. While this newly created modern Chinese medicine was stigmatized by its opponents as a mongrel form of medicine that was “neither donkey nor horse” it helped to shape the notion of modernity that came to be historically realized in China, that is, China’s modernity.Less

The Chinese Medical Revolution and the National Medicine Movement

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

Chapter 5 documents the key historic events that led to the rise of the National Medicine Movement. In March 1929, the National Board of Health unanimously passed a resolution to abolish the practice ... More

Chapter 5 documents the key historic events that led to the rise of the National Medicine Movement. In March 1929, the National Board of Health unanimously passed a resolution to abolish the practice of traditional Chinese medicine. In response, proponents of Chinese medicine held a massive public demonstration in Shanghai and, for the first time ever, organized themselves into a national federation. This mobilization gave birth to the National Medicine Movement, effectively starting what would become a decade-long collective struggle between two styles of medicine. Instead of resisting the state, however, the proponents of this movement developed the vision of a “national medicine” and actively struggled to create a closer alliance between Chinese medicine and the Nationalist state. As they fought for the new professional interests that had been created and sanctioned by the state, this Movement was dedicated to pursuing upward mobility for practitioners of Chinese medicine by way of the state.Less

Chinese Traditional Aetiology and Methods of Cure in Hong Kong: (1976)*

Marjorie Topley

Jean DeBernardi (ed.)

in Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

The position of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong and the problems of official recognition are complex. This book discovered in follow-up interviews that specialists sometimes combine medical treatment ... More

The position of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong and the problems of official recognition are complex. This book discovered in follow-up interviews that specialists sometimes combine medical treatment with ritual treatments; that not all traditional doctors would assert that ritual treatment was without value, although none regarded ritual as their own province; and that some modern Chinese doctors would not say there was nothing in Chinese traditional medicine. One physician used a combination of Chinese and modern medicine in his practice, and a few thought ritual, although not a true method of cure, might have value for certain kinds of patients. This chapter was prompted largely by these discoveries. The data obtained in 1969 have been augmented with information from additional specialists. It does not generalize for the whole of Hong Kong. Dialect differences often go with other sub-cultural differences, and it is possible that some things, particularly concerning ritual practices, have no relevance to other groups.Less

Conclusion:: Thinking with Modern Chinese Medicine

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

To explore the general implications suggested by the early history of modern Chinese medicine presented in the previous chapters, Chapter 11 recasts these historical findings as a heuristic tool for ... More

To explore the general implications suggested by the early history of modern Chinese medicine presented in the previous chapters, Chapter 11 recasts these historical findings as a heuristic tool for reflecting on a series of ever-expanding issues: (1) the relationship between medicine and the state, (2) the (im)possibility of productive cross-breeding between Chinese medicine and biomedicine, (3) the notion of “China’s modernity,” and finally (4) the “Great Divide” between modern and pre-modern, as analyzed by Bruno Latour. Against the discourse of a “Great Divide,” this newly re-assembled modern Chinese medicine took the discourse of modernity (and related knowledge of biomedicine) seriously and yet managed to survived the resulting epistemic violence by way of negotiation and self-innovation. In this sense, the historic rise of this “neither donkey nor horse” medicine constitutes a local innovation of crucial importance for the notion of China’s modernity, challenging us to imagine different kinds of relationships between science and non-Western knowledge traditions.Less

The Germ Theory and the Prehistory of “Pattern Differentiation and Treatment Determination”

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

Chapter 8 examines the crucial debate on “the Unification of Nomenclature of Chinese Diseases,” the first and most important step in the efforts by the Institute of National Medicine to scientize ... More

Chapter 8 examines the crucial debate on “the Unification of Nomenclature of Chinese Diseases,” the first and most important step in the efforts by the Institute of National Medicine to scientize Chinese medicine. The key issues of this debate were whether or not to assimilate the germ theory and the related ontological conception of disease into Chinese medical theory, and second, what the proper categorical relationship should look like between infectious diseases as defined by the germ theory and the two major traditional Chinese disease categories of Cold Damage and Warm Disease? Despite the fact that this debate failed to reach a consensus, the official category of notifiable infectious disease was incorporated into the organizing principles of disease classification in Chinese medicine. Drawing on the Japanese style of Chinese Medicine, practitioners of Chinese medicine developed the incipient form of what later became the defining feature of so-called “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (TCM), namely “pattern differentiation and treatment determination.”Less

Public Bodies

Joan Judge

in Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality, and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press

The nuance and insight of women’s writings is apparent in their discussion of issues related to women’s reproductive health. Chapter 4 probes the complexity of obstetrical and gynecological ... More

The nuance and insight of women’s writings is apparent in their discussion of issues related to women’s reproductive health. Chapter 4 probes the complexity of obstetrical and gynecological discourses in the early twentieth century, a period of creative and chaotic encounters between Chinese medical principles and scientific biomedicine. The chapter examines the full range of materials related to women’s reproductive health in Funü shibao. These include Bao Tianxiao’s editorial promotion of a new biomedical imperative, advertisements for pharmaceutical products targeting women’s health, articles by obstetrical experts, and accounts of experience by women authors. The chapter highlights three tensions in the medical discourse: between reform and commerce, between experience and expertise, and between male constructions of pathologically modest women and women’s own graphically candid writings on childbirth, menstruation, and breast health.Less

Medicine: Expression of the General State of Mind

Paul U. Unschuld

in What Is Medicine?: Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing

This chapter provides a comparative look at Chinese and Greek medicine. Chinese medicine was created in an environment that recognized the exchange between various regional centers as the foundation ... More

This chapter provides a comparative look at Chinese and Greek medicine. Chinese medicine was created in an environment that recognized the exchange between various regional centers as the foundation of a new state organism, the unified empire. The idea of the relationships of various functional centers in the human organism was the most important feature of Chinese medicine for two millennia. In China, we have the impression that the yin-yang and five agents doctrines of the systematic relationships of all phenomena had the support and approval of part of the elite. The Greek medical theorists considered the doctrine of correspondences, but it was of less importance. The doctrines of the four elements, the four humors and a few other corresponding groups of four were kept very short. Greek medicine was created in an environment that recognized the autarchy of small political units as the foundation of a new state organism, the polis democracy. The exchange between various centers was of marginal importance. The significant thing was the individual center. The significance of relationships among individuals had less prominence in Greek antiquity compared to the emphasis on such relationships in China.Less

Scorn, Mockery, and Invectives for Chinese Medicine

Paul U. Unschuld

in What Is Medicine?: Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing

This chapter talks about the lack of respect and criticism for Chinese medicine. Europe's unbelievable enthusiasm in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to gain new knowledge by doing research ... More

This chapter talks about the lack of respect and criticism for Chinese medicine. Europe's unbelievable enthusiasm in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to gain new knowledge by doing research and experiments had no parallel in China's tradition. The peak of this search came during and after World War I, when the imperial powers humiliated China. Several authors and filmmakers at this time of awakening used Chinese medicine as a symbol of their fathers' and grandfathers' most ineffective ways of thinking and put Chinese medicine at the center of their attacks on the structures that were to be overcome. At the end of the 1920s, impetuous and un-Chinese petitions for a referendum were introduced to completely forbid tradition, effective immediately. The decision-makers and the reformers trusted solely in modern Western medicine.Less

Weisheng and the Desire for Modernity

RUTH ROGASKI

in Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China

This chapter reports the four “cases” of weisheng from Tianjin of the 1920s and 1930s. The first case explores evidence of weisheng in the advertisements from Tianjin's major republican-era ... More

This chapter reports the four “cases” of weisheng from Tianjin of the 1920s and 1930s. The first case explores evidence of weisheng in the advertisements from Tianjin's major republican-era newspaper, Da gong bao (L'Impartial). The ambitious plans of the Guomindang and the critiques launched by Tianjin's new medical elite form the center of the second case. The third case begins with a lecture on minzu weisheng, or racial hygiene, given in Tianjin in 1935 by the “father of Chinese eugenics,” Pan Guangdan. The last case considers the physician of Chinese medicine, Ding Zilang, who critiqued the underlying premises of modern weisheng and put forth a revitalized Chinese medicine as the way to achieve health and to resist imperialism. Standards of health and vigor were set by Japanese and Western products that helped overcome implied Chinese deficiencies of weakness and filth.Less

Historical epistemology and the making of modern Chinese medicine

Howard Chiang

in Historical epistemology and the making of modern Chinese medicine

This chapter introduces the volume by situating historical epistemology in its proper intellectual and cultural genealogy (from the late nineteenth century to the present), by arguing for the ... More

This chapter introduces the volume by situating historical epistemology in its proper intellectual and cultural genealogy (from the late nineteenth century to the present), by arguing for the usefulness of historical epistemology to move beyond the limitation of the medicalization thesis, and by providing an overview of the book and delineating a history of the objects, authority, and existence of modern Chinese medicine that connects the broader social forces and challenges of globalization to the internal epistemic formations of East Asian medical knowledge.Less

Visualizing Health Care in 1930s Shanghai

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

Instead of treating “Chinese medicine” and “Western medicine” as well-established distinct groups, Chapter 6 argues that these two styles of medicine took shape only gradually as they competed with ... More

Instead of treating “Chinese medicine” and “Western medicine” as well-established distinct groups, Chapter 6 argues that these two styles of medicine took shape only gradually as they competed with each other vis-a-vis the state. To support this argument, this chapter explores a fascinating diagram of the healthcare landscape in 1930’s Shanghai that was created in 1933 by Pang Jingzhou, a vocal critic of Chinese medicine. By way of discussing more than forty items listed in this diagram, Chapter 6 shows both the remarkable heterogeneity within these two styles of medicine, and the complicated inter-group dynamics among them. As this diagram includes folk medicine and religious practices, it furthermore shows how modern Chinese medicine purged itself of these healthcare practices and thereby re-emerged as a national entity from this historic confrontation.Less

State Medicine for Rural China, 1929–49

Sean Hsiang-lin Lei

in Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity

The alliance between the state and Western medicine culminated when the Nationalist government included in its first constitution of 1947 a commitment to the policy of State Medicine, a healthcare ... More

The alliance between the state and Western medicine culminated when the Nationalist government included in its first constitution of 1947 a commitment to the policy of State Medicine, a healthcare system through which the state guaranteed all Chinese citizens equal and free access to healthcare services. Specifically, I explore why the Nationalist government came to accept this daunting responsibility of providing State Medicine in the early 1940s. The key to this question lies in the emergence of rural China as the crucial arena for the political struggle between the Nationalist and Communist Parties in the 1930s. In their attempt to address this seemingly impossible task of providing modern healthcare to China’s rural residents, various historical actors—the Rural Reconstruction Movement, the China Medical Association, the Nationalist government, and the advocates of Chinese medicine—all arrived at the conclusion that State Medicine represented the only solution to China’s Health Problem.Less

Between the Mad and the Mentally Ill

Emily Baum

in The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China

This chapter confronts the assumption that "modern" and "traditional" medicine were incompatible in 1930s China. Through a series of vignettes, it suggests that "madness" (as it was conceived in ... More

This chapter confronts the assumption that "modern" and "traditional" medicine were incompatible in 1930s China. Through a series of vignettes, it suggests that "madness" (as it was conceived in Chinese medicine) and "mental illness" (as it was conceived in contemporary Western psychiatry) were ultimately reconcilable. The first vignette shows how Chinese medicine practitioners were able to systematically integrate the Chinese “heart” and the biomedical “brain” into a single conceptual system, thereby retaining the epistemic utility of both. The second vignette focuses on the translation of psychiatric terms, and describes how intellectuals invoked Chinese medical concepts to explain neuropsychiatric neologisms, blurring their respective boundaries in the process. The third vignette discusses the various ways that Chinese patients experimented with new care-seeking behaviors -- such as being treated within a hospital -- while continuing to articulate their illness narratives in a traditional vocabulary. The final vignette shows how Western-trained physicians, many of whom were working at the Peking Union Medical College, were compelled to reconsider their mechanistic vision of mind-body dualism when confronted with the alternative assumptions of Chinese medicine. The sociologist Dai Bingham was instrumental in this process.Less

Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

Volker Scheid

in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical ... More

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.Less