unschuld's case study on the history of chinese medicine mainly argues

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Paul U. Unschuld and Bridie J. Andrews (trans), Traditional Chinese Medicine: Heritage and Adaptation

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Melissa S Dale, Paul U. Unschuld and Bridie J. Andrews (trans), Traditional Chinese Medicine: Heritage and Adaptation , Social History of Medicine , Volume 32, Issue 1, February 2019, Pages 204–205, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky093

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How has a foreign system of medicine, once dismissed due to its scientifically unverifiable healing methods, gained worldwide attention and become considered by some as a component of Western health care systems? In this concise history of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), one of the leading experts on the history of Chinese medicine presents his readers with 19 short chapters on its history and on the changing attitudes towards TCM since it ‘went global’ in the 1970s. Paul U. Unschuld’s book, first published in German in 2013 and now translated into English by Bridie J. Andrews, carries on the long tradition of Chinese–Western medical exchange first initiated by Westerners in the late sixteenth century, both informing and stimulating thought about TCM’s cultural background and political implications today.

Decrying the vast amount of misinformation about TCM, as evidenced by an array of examples pulled from the internet, Unschuld tasks himself with writing a book that will provide ‘solid information’ for ‘decision makers and the general public’ faced with how to deal with ‘the public health problem’ (p.x) raised by TCM’s arrival in the West. Unschuld presents this information in two parts: tracing the history of Chinese medicine from its emergence more than 2,000 years ago and then devoting the rest of the book to Chinese medicine’s development and its globalization as TCM from the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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Medical Ethics in Imperial China: A Study in Historical Anthropology. Paul U. Unschuld

1981, Medical Anthropology Newsletter

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An Expert on Chinese Medicine, but No New Age Healer

By Ian Johnson

• Sept. 23, 2016

BERLIN — One day in 1971, the doorbell rang at Paul U. Unschuld’s apartment in Munich. He opened the door to find a young man, who laconically said in English: “Hi, I am James Quinn, C.I.A. Tell me about the military usage of acupuncture.”

So began the German academic’s rise from relative obscurity to his position as the West’s leading authority on ancient Chinese healing practices. One of the first Western scholars to tackle Chinese medicine in a systematic and serious way, Dr. Unschuld has seen his subject more as a way to interpret Chinese civilization than as a New Age answer to modern medicine.

Respected and sometimes resented for his scrupulousness in translating Chinese medical texts, Dr. Unschuld, a tall man of regal bearing, harks back to an era of scholarship, when people who engaged with China were called Sinologists — those who studied broad swaths of the Chinese world that reflected their wide-ranging interests.

For Dr. Unschuld, that has included amassing a collection of statues of medical deities that is planned to be a centerpiece of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum , a new museum under construction that will showcase non-European cultures.

Dr. Unschuld has also collected 1,100 antique manuscripts that could give clues to how medicine was practiced at China’s grass-roots level. The manuscripts contain more than 40,000 prescriptions that are being examined for promising ingredients, with some of the remedies for epilepsy already being studied by a Chinese-German start-up .

In his spare time, Dr. Unschuld has led German government delegations to China, and has written books on how medicine helps to explain China’s rise to global prominence.

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Traditional Chinese medicine : heritage and adaptation

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• Preface to the English Edition Introduction Part I: The Historical Foundations
• 1. Origins and Characteristics of Chinese Medicine
• 2. The Lack of Existential Autonomy
• 3. The Longing for Existential Autonomy
• 4. Quotations from the Medical Classics
• 5. The Banality of Violence
• 6. The Mawangdui Texts
• 7. Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology in the New Medicine
• 8. Deficiencies in the Credibility of the New Medicine
• 9. The Alternative Model: The View from Illness
• 10. Radical Healing: Life as a Form of Disease
• 11. Between Antiquity and the Modern Age
• 12. Two Medical Authors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties Part II: Modern and Contemporary Times
• 13. The Confrontation with the Western Way of Life
• 14. The Persuasiveness of Western Medicine
• 15. The Opinions of Intellectuals and Politicians
• 16. The Selection
• 17. The Surprise
• 18. The Creative Reception of Chinese Medicine in the West
• 19. The Objectification of the Discussion: Opportunity and Challenge Epilogue Notes Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

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Sinosphere | q. and a.: paul u. unschuld on reconciling chinese and western medicine, q. and a.: paul u. unschuld on reconciling chinese and western medicine.

Read in Chinese | 点击查看本文中文版

Paul U. Unschuld, 72, is a leading scholar of the history and ideas that underlie Chinese medicine. He has taught at what was then the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health and since 2006 has headed an institute at the Charité hospital in Berlin that studies the theories, history and ethics of Chinese life sciences.

Dr. Unschuld is the author of several of the West’s most influential books on Chinese medicine, including “Medicine in China: A History of Ideas,” “What Is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing” and “The Fall and Rise of China: Healing the Trauma of History.” In an interview, he discussed Tu Youyou’s Nobel Prize and how Chinese officials view their country’s medical heritage.

In “The Fall and Rise of China” you write: “From the very start (of the reform movement in the early 20th century), Chinese medicine was at the center of criticism. That is hardly surprising. Nowhere within a culture are fears and optimism expressed as swiftly and existentially as in the attitudes toward one’s own illness.”

The Chinese Empire was subject to a series of humiliations beginning with the First Opium War, 1839-42. The sovereignty of China over its territory appeared to have reached its lowest point exactly 100 years ago, in 1915, when Japan made its 21 Demands [extending its control in China]. These exceeded anything the Western powers had ever demanded from China and marked the beginning of decades of Japanese annexation efforts, a large-scale invasion, including the most appalling war crimes against the Chinese people.

Many Chinese intellectuals saw their country as ill, and writers like Ba Jin and Lu Xun identified Chinese medicine as a symbol of China’s illness. Reformers and revolutionaries were in complete agreement that it should have no future. Naturally, conservatives raised their voice, too, warning against elimination of such a central element of Chinese culture, but, in general, ideas like yin and yang or the Five Phases [the interaction among the five elements: wood, earth, water, fire and metal] were denounced as obsolete.

And eventually the government shifted on Western medicine?

The turning point was the Manchurian plague of 1910-11 . The population burned vinegar and set off fireworks to drive out demons, but such traditional measures didn’t stop the plague. Finally, the authorities turned to an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, Wu Lien-teh, a Western-trained microbiologist. He quickly brought the plague under control with basic public health policies unknown before in Chinese medicine. This was a big signal to the Chinese government: We have to get closer to Western medicine, or we’re finished.

And China did move quickly.

Once the superiority of such public health measures had been recognized, a very rational attitude towards Western science and medicine was adopted that may be characteristic of China. A victim needs to look at himself to realize why he was put down. If the West can do this to us, they must have something we don’t have. We’ll get it, and in the next round we shall see. There’s an old saying: “Wo ming zai wo, bu zai tian.” My fate is in my hands, not heaven’s. This principle has been applied in China both in politics and in health care for the past 2,000 years.

In terms of Chinese medicine, do you see this continuing today?

Certainly. In 2007, the government invited politicians and experts from 50 countries to draft the Beijing Declaration on Traditional Chinese Medicine and declared T.C.M. to be part of biomedicine. The future of T.C.M. was seen in molecular biological legitimation. I was the German delegate, and one high-ranking Chinese politician voiced amazement to me that some Westerners, exposed to modern science for centuries, believe in the Five Phases theory. You see, political decision makers in China can’t understand this because the Five Phases doctrine won’t make your mobile phone work. It won’t shoot a rocket to the moon. The government is not interested in promoting yin and yang and the Five Phases because it is convinced that people who believe in that are lost for the strengthening of China vis-à-vis the West. And we do see that young Chinese people are less and less open to these ideas. T.C.M. colleges in China have problems finding competent students.

What about the Nobel Prize and Chinese medicine?

I met Prof. Tu Youyou in the 1970s. She was a modern pharmacological researcher, working on harnessing certain herbs. She’s a perfect example for the successful modernization of Chinese medicine. Her successes are unrelated to yin and yang or the Five Phases. She had a great education in Western science, and she and her team searched through ancient literature for medications recommended to cure malaria. She used modern science to analyze Artemisia annua, figured out the active ingredient of the plant and modified it until it exerted an antimalaria effect never achieved in China before. That is what Mao Zedong had asked for: the unification of historical Chinese and modern Western medicine.

These views contradict how many in the West see Chinese medicine.

Professor Tu’s discovery had nothing to do with what most Westerners define as traditional Chinese medicine, except that the substance she examined is described in ancient pharmaceutical literature. The Chinese authorities are trying to strip historical Chinese medicine of superstition and nonsense. What is left can exist with molecular biology.

That disappoints those in the West who see T.C.M. as an alternative to biomedicine. These people don’t understand why the Chinese authorities act like this. The trauma of the 19th- and early-20th-century humiliation is still present. For 100 years, China has been struggling on many fronts to catch up with the West. Professor Tu’s Nobel Prize is proof of the success of this policy.

And yet many people in China opt for traditional medicine.

Western medicine can’t achieve miracles, and there are many everyday health problems it cannot solve. Many Chinese — and Westerners — know that there are recipes in Chinese medicine that work, regardless of whether there is scientific evidence. It is a characteristic common to all societies with a coexistence of modern and traditional health care options. Patients are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the alternatives and oscillate between modernity and tradition accordingly.

Follow Ian Johnson on Twitter @iandenisjohnson .

What's Next

How Chinese Is ‘Chinese Medicine’?

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• Paul U. Unschuld 5  

Part of the book series: International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine ((LIME,volume 44))

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Was Chinese medicine already familiar with the circulatory system before it was confronted with Western knowledge of physiology in the nineteenth century? We can safely assume so.

In handwritten Chinese medical texts from past centuries we find the notion that a ‘bloodworm’ is located in the body. The bloodworm has a head — a ‘blood head’. Like a train, the bloodworm passes through the entire body. In the course of 12 two-hour periods it passes through a system of pathways — one could also say blood vessels — which are marked by 365 points, comparable to train stations. However, the bloodworm does not stop at these points voluntarily. Authorities on this theory know just where to find the blood head at any given point during the day or night. They also know that by gently touching the ‘station’ at which the blood head has just arrived, they can bring the bloodworm to a stop. They do not have to apply great pressure to this point — quite the opposite. A chopstick, a calligraphy brush or a feather will suffice. Once the bloodworm has come to a stop, then the body in which it was moving is also condemned to a standstill. At this point it is possible to kill the victim or to set it back in motion. This particular knowledge is thus used only in combat; martial arts specialists pass it on from generation to generation.

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Liturgical Time and Tehching Hsieh

Convergence

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Ralf Moritz (1998) Konfuzianismus und die ‘Hundert Zeitalter’, in Ralf Moritz and Lee Ming-huei (eds.), Der Konfuzianismus. Ursprünge — Entwicklungen — Perspektive. Mitteldeutsche Studien zu Ostasien . 1. Leipzig, pp. 76–86.

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Adapted from Wolfgang Bauer, China und die Hoffnung auf Glück , München, 1971, 65.

For the full account, please see Kim Taylor (2000) Medicine of Revolution: Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China (1945–1963). Dissertation, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

For a more comprehensive treatment of this chapter's underlying thesis, see P.U. Unschuld (2003) Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen. Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in an Ancient Chinese Medical Text . Berkeley, Los Angeles, London; and P.U. Unschuld (2003) Was ist Medizin? Westliche und ×stliche Wege der Heilkunst . München.

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Professor, Horst-Goertz-Insititute for the Theory, History and Ethics of Chinese Life Sciences, Charité University Medical Centre Berlin, Germany

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Unschuld, P.U. (2009). How Chinese Is ‘Chinese Medicine’?. In: Elm, S., Willich, S.N. (eds) Quo Vadis Medical Healing. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 44. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8942-8_6

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Paul u. unschuld, medicine in china. a history of pharmaceutics. berkeley, los angeles and london, university of california press, 1986, 4to, pp. xiii, 366, illus., £40.50..

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Medicine in China : a history of ideas

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What Is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing

• by Paul U. Unschuld (Author) , Karen Reimers (Translator)
• September 2009
• First Edition
• Hardcover $95.00,  £80.00 Paperback $34.95,  £30.00 eBook $34.95,  £30.00

Title Details

Rights: Available worldwide Pages: 256 ISBN: 9780520257665 Trim Size: 6 x 9 Illustrations: 4 b/w photographs

About the Book

What Is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing is the first comparative history of two millennia of Western and Chinese medicine from their beginnings in the centuries BCE through present advances in sciences like molecular biology and in Western adaptations of traditional Chinese medicine. In his revolutionary interpretation of the basic forces that undergird shifts in medical theory, Paul U. Unschuld relates the history of medicine in both Europe and China to changes in politics, economics, and other contextual factors. Drawing on his own extended research of Chinese primary sources as well as his and others' scholarship in European medical history, Unschuld argues against any claims of “truth” in former and current, Eastern and Western models of physiology and pathology. What Is Medicine? makes an eloquent and timely contribution to discussions on health care policies while illuminating the nature of cognitive dynamics in medicine, and it stimulates fresh debate on the essence and interpretation of reality in medicine's attempts to manage the human organism.

About the Author

Paul U. Unschuld is Professor and Director of the Horst-Goertz Institute for the Theory, History, and Ethics of Chinese Life Sciences, Charité Medical University-Berlin. He is the author of numerous works on European medical history and Chinese medical history including Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics and Huang Di Nei Jing Wen: Nature, Knowledge, Imagery in and Ancient Chinese Medical Text, both from UC Press. Karen Reimers, MD is a graduate of McGill University and the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich.

“Here we have a book of real maturity. . . . it is a valuable work, especially because of the lack of serious analyses of medicine and its history with similar aspirations.” —Luis Montiel East Asian Science, Technology, And Medicine

“Fascinating, intelligent, and credible.” —Luis Montiel East Asian Science, Technology, And Medicine

Table of Contents

Preface 1 Life = Body Plus X 1 2 Medicine, or Novelty Appeal 3 Why Laws of Nature? 4 Longing for Order 5 Ethics and Legality 6 Why Here? Why Now? 7 Thales’ Trite Observation 8 Polis, Law, and Self-determination 9 The Individual and the Whole 10 Nonmedical Healing 11 Mawangdui: Early Healing in China 12 Humans Are Biologically Identical across Cultures. So Why Not Medicine? 13 The Yellow Thearch’s Body Image 14 The Birth of Chinese Medicine 15 The Division of the Elite 16 A View to the Visible, and Opinions on the Invisible 17 State Concept and Body Image 18 Farewell to Demons and Spirits 19 New Pathogens, and Morality 20 Medicine without Pharmaceutics 21 Pharmaceutics without Medicine 22 Puzzling Parallels 23 The Beginning of Medicine in Greece 24 The End of Monarchy 25 Troublemakers and Ostracism 26 I See Something You Don’t See 27 Powers of Self-healing: Self-evident? 28 Confucians’ Fear of Chaos 29 Medicine: Expression of the General State of Mind 30 Dynamic Ideas and Faded Model Images 31 The Hour of the Dissectors 32 Manifold Experiences of the World 33 Greek Medicine and Roman Incomprehension 34 Illness as Stasis 35 Head and Limbs 36 The Rediscovery of Wholeness 37 To Move the Body to a Statement 38 Galen of Pergamon: Collector in All Worlds 39 Europe’s Ancient Pharmacology 40 The Wheel of Progress Turns No More 41 Constancy and Discontinuity of Structures 42 Arabian Interlude 43 The Tang Era: Cultural Diversity, Conceptual Vacuum 44 Changes in the Song Era 45 The Authority of Distant Antiquity 46 Zhang Ji’s Belated Honors 47 Chinese Pharmacology 48 The Diagnosis Game 49 The Physician as the Pharmacist’s Employee 50 Relighting the Torch of European Antiquity 51 The Primacy of the Practical 52 The Variety of Therapeutics 53 Which Model Image for a New Medicine? 54 The Real Heritage of Antiquity 55 Galenism as Trade in Antiques UC-Unschuld-1pps.indd 10 3/17/29 12:50:21 PM 56 Integration and Reductionism in the Song Dynasty 57 The New Freedom to Expand Knowledge 58 Healing the State, Healing the Organism 59 Trapped in the Cage of Tradition 60 Xu Dachun, Giovanni Morgagni, and Intra-abdominal Abscesses 61 Acupuncturists, Barbers, and Masseurs 62 No Scientific Revolution in Medicine 63 The Discovery of New Worlds 64 Paracelsus: A Tumultuous Mind with an Overview 65 Durable and Fragile Cage Bars 66 The Most Beautiful Antiques and the Most Modern Images in One Room 67 Harvey and the Magna Carta 68 A Cartesian Case for Circulation 69 Long Live the Periphery! 70 Out of the Waiting Shelter, into the Jail Cell 71 Sensations that Pull into the Lower Parts of the Body 72 Homeopathy Is Not Medicine 73 “God with Us” on the Belt Buckle 74 Medicine Independent of Theology 75 Virchow: The Man of Death as the Interpreter of Life 76 Robert Koch: Pure Science? 77 Wash Your Hands, Keep the Germs Away 78 AIDS: The Disease that Fits 79 China in the Nineteenth Century: A New Cage Opens Up 80 Two Basic Ideas of Medicine 81 Value-free Biology and Cultural Interpretation 82 A Transit Visa and a Promise 83 Scorn, Mockery, and Invectives for Chinese Medicine 84 Traditional Medicine in the PRC: Faith in Science 85 The Arabs of the Twentieth Century, or Crowding in the Playpen 86 When the Light Comes from Behind 87 In the Beginning Was the Word 88 Out of Touch with Nature 89 Theology without Theos 90 Everything Will Be Fine 91 Left Alone in the Computer Tomograph 92 Healing and the Energy Crisis 93 TCM: Western Fears, Chinese Set Pieces 94 Harmony, Not War 95 The Loss of the Center 96 Contented Customers in a Supermarket of Possibilities 97 The More Things Change 98 One World, or Tinkering with Building Blocks 99 A Vision of Unity over All Diversity

Afterword Notes Index

• 11th Special Book Award of China, State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television

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• Corpus ID: 68723538

Medicine in China: Historical Artifacts and Images

• P. Unschuld
• Published 1 April 2000
• History, Medicine, Art

13 Citations

Natural history connects medical concepts and painting theories in china, veterinary acupuncture and traditional chinese medicine : facts and fallacies, acupuncture and ‘traditional chinese medicine’ in the horse. part 1: a historical overview, the limits of illustration: animalia and pharmacopeia from guo pu to bencao gangmu, commercializing medicine or benefiting the people – the first public pharmacy in china, ‘the healer of all illnesses’: the origins and development of rûm’s gift to the tang court: theriac, chinese herbal medicine for dementia & related disorders: an evaluation of traditional and scientific evidence, health maintenance in ancient china, current bibliography of the history of science and its cultural influences 2003, analytic essay on the domestic statuary of central hunan: the cult to divinities, parents, and masters, related papers.

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