Medicine in East Asia
HI 176: Lecture 7
Dr. Howard Chiang
Western Medicine and
Self-Strengthening
-
Treaty ports – e.g., Shanghai & Tianjin
‘cultural imperialism’ – Western medicine to E Asia
Tokugawa Japan – Dutch East India Company
17th & 18th c. China – Jesuit Missionaries
- 1693, French Dominique Parennin, Manchu Anatomy
- 19th c. China – Protestant Missionaries
- British Benjamin Hobson, Outline of Anatomy and
Physiology (1851) – first systematic translation
- Tongwen Guan in Beijing – translators’ school
- Scottish John Dudgeon, Gray’s Anatomy (1886)
- American John Kerr, Refuge for the Insane (1898)
Manchu Anatomy (1693)
Benjamin Hobson (1851)
Kerr Refuge for the Insane
History of Modern Chinese Medicine
Peking Union Medical College
Peking Union Medical College
The Spectrum of Medical Practice in
the Early 20th Century
-
American Rockefeller Foundation
Missionary-run hospitals and clinics
Multidenominational ‘union medical colleges’
Military hospitals of the Chinese, Japanese, and
Russian armies
- Medical facilities in the colonial treaty ports
- Chinese Customs Service quarantine stations
- Private and government hospitals
- Pharmacies and drugstores – Chinese or Western
The Spectrum of Medical Practice in
the Early 20th Century
- “Chinese Medicine”:
- scholarly physicians
- graduates of the new colleges of Chinese medicine
- specialists such as the Bamboo Grove monks
- martial artists
- acupuncturists
- itinerant peddlers of Chinese drugs
- medical advisors in temples
- dentists
- Women healers:
- midwives; specialists in pediatric care; smallpox
variolation specialists
- Vaccination
The Spectrum of Medical Practice in
the Early 20th Century
- Literate Medicine – medical lineages
- Four Famous Physicians of the Jin and Yuan
Dynasties
- Warm Diseases (wenbing, 溫病)
- Cold Damage
- family lineage – e.g., Menghe in Jiangsu (Volker
Scheid)
- Response to epidemics
- collective organization of large processions in the
streets to expel the ‘demons’ causing the disease
- Eventually harmonized into a single medical system
in which modern biomedicine became the model
History of Modern Chinese Medicine
Public Health & the Modern State
- Public health is a function of the modern state
- emerged first in Britain – English Utilitarian’s
program for greater worker efficiency
- In China
- exam required for Imperial Medical Academy
- free distribution of medicine by local magistrates –
Angela Leung’s article on organized medicine in
Ming-Qing China – increasingly left to the charitable
activities of the local elites
- 1902: late Qing’s first municipal health bureau
created in Tianjin – ‘protect the lives of the people’
- Ministry of Civil Affairs – police and public health
- Manchurian plague (1910-1911)
Manchurian Plague (1910-11)
Manchurian Plague (1910-11)
1911: International
Plague Conference
North Manchurian
Plague Prevention
Service – China’s first
attempt at a public
health service
1911: International
Plague Conference
North Manchurian
Plague Prevention
Service – China’s first
attempt at a public
health service
First Medical Licensing Exam
- 1909 Duanfang (端方):
1. Describe the advantages and disadvantages of
Chinese and Western pulse taking.
2. Describe the similarities and differences between
Chinese and Western pharmacy.
3. Discuss the use of anesthetic drugs in ancient times.
4. Discuss the properties and uses of X-rays.
5. Discuss Chinese and Western needling techniques.
6. Discuss the cause and treatment of rat-borne plague
- Required candidates to be familiar with both classical
medical literature and Western medicine (e.g., X-rays
and serum therapy)
Scientism
-
Scientism – emerged in the May 4th/New Culture
National education system?
1913: All China Medical Pharmaceutical Association
Wang Daxie: “I have decided in future to abolish
Chinese medicine and also not to use Chinese drugs”
- Refusal to include Chinese medicine in the national
education system did not mean trying to abolish
Chinese medicine
- In November 1908 – a new Western medicine
department, with a Western pharmacy was installed
in the Imperial Medical Academy alongside its
traditional counterparts
Chen Duxiu, ‘Call to Youth’,
New Youth (1915):
‘Our men of learning do not
understand science; thus they
make use of yin-yang signs and
beliefs in the five elements to
confuse the world and delude
the people…Our doctors do not
understand science; they not
only know nothing of human
anatomy, but also know nothing
of the analysis of medicines; as
for bacterial poisoning and
infections, they have not even
heard of them.’
Scientism
- Leaders of the Chinese medical community
responded with attempts to make Chinese medicine
appear scientific:
- edited new textbooks
- reliance on classical medical theory as a liability
- medical education – Shanghai Technical College of
Chinese Medicine was founded in 1915
- 1920s and 1930s: founding of many other new
schools of Chinese medicine – curriculum included
Western anatomy and physiology (even pathology
and bacteriology)
Movement to Abolish Chinese
Medicine
- 1928: China’s first Ministry of Health
- Yu Yunxiu (1879-1954) proposed a motion to ‘abolish
old-style medicine in order to clear away the
obstacles to medicine and public health’
- First National Public Health Conference approved the
motion
- Response of the Chinese medical community:
- a national conference of Chinese medicine on
March 17, 1929, a date later declared the National
Medicine Day
- National Union of Medical and Pharmaceutical
Organizations – 5-member delegation to Nanjing
Formation of the Institute of
National Medicine
- Chinese medicine allied with the National Studies
movement – ‘National Medicine’
- 1931: the Institute of National Medicine – with the aim
to ‘scientize’ Chinese medicine (inc. pharmacopea)
- Chinese physicians began to marginalize those
peers who refrained from engaging with the project
of scientization
- Japanese influence:
- a movement for preserving kanpo (Sino-Japanese
medicine) flourished as a way to maintain cultural
identity by way of ‘scientizing’ traditional medicine
- Chinese doctors borrowed the strategy from their
kanpo predecessors in Japan
Reinvention of Acupuncture
Reinvention of Acupuncture
Reinvention of Acupuncture
- Cheng Dan’an (承淡安, 1899-1957)
- mapped Western anatomy and physiology onto the
meridian tracts of acupuncture (jingluo, 經絡):
The pathways of acupuncture points recorded by our forebears
are mostly lacking in detail. There is even less recorded about
the contents of the acupuncture pathways. This book employs
scientific methods to correct this. Each acupoint must be
elucidated anatomically….In manipulating acupoints, although
our forebears needled into arteries, this was still needling the
nerves of that area, and certainly not [primarily] rupturing the
artery….However, when they did needle them (arteries) the
objective was [to reach] the nerves at that spot.
20th Century Transformations
Chinese medicine in the PRC (1949-present):
- 1949-53 – subsumed under biomedicine
- 1954-65 – creation of ‘traditional Chinese medicine’
- 1966-77 – contracted by ideological simplification
- 1976-89 – exploded into myriad options/possibilities
- 1989-present – integration into global health care
Globalization:
- Actively supported by WHO, promoted by the Chinese
state, dispersed by Chinese physicians, studied by
conventional and alternative practitioners throughout
the world, sought after by international clientele of
patients
Chinese medicine
- cultural imperialism?