A Brief History of Chinese Medicine and Its Influence

The following sections are included:

• Preface to the Second Edition

• Preface to the First Edition

• CONTENTS

The proper study of medicine involves a study of its history. The development of medicine is not only concerned with the skills and science of the subject, but also with its ethics and education. It is appropriate that aspiring doctors beginning their basic training should have at least an outline knowledge of the history of their subject. Growing interest in the history of medicine is apparent from the large number of contemporary publications…

The pinyin system for romanising Chinese was introduced in China in the 1950s. It is now the official romanisation system in the People's Republic of China, and has been adopted by the United Nations and other World agencies, it is now the system most commonly used in scholarship and journalism, largely supplanting the older Wade-Giles system. In most cases the pinyin system is pronounced as it looks, the important exceptions being the pinyin “c” pronounced as “ts”, and the “q”, which is pronounced as “ch”…

The traditional Chinese healing arts form an integral part of Chinese culture. One cannot appreciate Chinese culture fully without taking into account the basic concepts of Chinese thought which were employed to explain not only all phenomena in nature, but also all human activities. Historically China has made immense contributions to medicine in the fields of pharmacology, physiology (such as endocrinology), clinical medicine, public health, medical colleges (including medical education and examination systems), the registration of physicians, acupuncture, moxibustion, and so on. Some of these practices and ideas came to Europe by way of western Asia along the Silk Road and by sea via the Arabs…

Chinese medical concepts and practice had a profound influence on the neighbouring countries of East, Southeast and South Asia. They also penetrated westwards along the ancient Silk Road to Persia and thereby became absorbed into the Arab world. Between China and India there were reciprocal influences, along the trade routes through Burma in the east and the Khunjerab Pass in the Karakoram mountain range in the west.

We cite two examples in our account of Chinese thought penetration, one where there was a profound influence, namely Japan, and one which the eddies of Chinese medical thought touched, namely the Islamic world.

Historically Japan grew up within a cultural environment in eastern Asia in which China was the centre. However, the isolation of the Japanese islands has made for an unusually unified and self-contained history. Protected from the play of competing civilisations or the periodic disruption of foreign invasion, the Japanese people in historic times have lived a relatively undisturbed existence. Yet their culture has undergone a succession of fundamental changes that transformed it from a primitive tribal society prior to the sixth century into a nation of aristocratic bureaucrats from the seventh through the twelfth centuries; later, into a land of contending feudal powers; and finally, into its present condition as a modern nation state.

After the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 and the defeat of the tribes of central Arabia which had revolted against Islam, the unparalleled expansion of the Arabs took place. Within a century they had created an empire stretching from the Indian border to the Atlantic coasts of Spain and north Africa, with its main centres in Persia, Syria and Egypt. Countries had fallen to the Arabs whose population had reached a high level of culture, which was deeply influenced by Greek ideas and thus in certain areas presented a relatively uniform development…

There is no conclusion to this brief account of the epic evolution of the history of medicine. At the very moment where we halt, vast new vistas are opening up as medical science pushes the frontiers of knowledge forward. The most rapid advances in medicine have occurred within the life time of today's doctors.

In medicine as in science, the pure and the applied have progressed together over the years, the pure fertilising the applied with ideas, and the applied often providing the pure with the physical apparatus to help in the next intellectual leap forward. One may say that medical science is no more than the body of knowledge which is always being added on to by scientists, through controlled and reproducible observations. Medicine is a natural as well as social science, in the sense that it is concerned with human beings and is directed more immediately towards human welfare than any other natural science.

Modern science and medicine have immensely improved the lot of humanity. However, humanity can make use of these unimaginable powers for good or evil, but humanity has a major responsibility to insure that the world is safe for now and its future generations. Science and medicine are not standing still, and who can say how far the molecular biology, the chemistry or the physics of the future will have to adopt conceptions much more organicist than the atomic and mechanistic which have so far prevailed? Who knows what further developments of the psychosomatic conception in medicine's future advances may necessitate? In all such ways the thought complex of traditional Chinese sciences may yet have a much greater part to play in the future state of all sciences than might be admitted if science today was all that science will ever be.

Always we must remember that things are more complex than they seem, and that wisdom was not born with us, nor is it the property of any particular civilisation or people. The march of humanity in the study of Nature, of which humans are a part, is one single enterprise.

The following sections are included:

• Further Reading

• Glossary of Chinese Characters

• Subject Index

• Author Index