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Cure By NaturePierre Jean Cousin (8)    PJ Cousin A brief history of Chinese MedicinePosted Sunday, September 09, 2007 (2 years 77 days ago.) Viewed 104 times. acupuncture london, Chinese MedicineAccording to legend, when the world began the god P'an Ku created Yin and Yang out of chaos. When he had created the World his body was assimilated into it; his bones became the mountains, his muscle became the earth, his veins became the rivers, his breath the wind, his sweat the rain and his four limbs became the four pillars which hold up the four corners of the world. From the earliest times Chinese people developed a theoretical view of their relationship with nature which was based on the dynamic interplay between Yin and Yang and the concept of Tao. "Since the entire Universe followed one immutable course which became manifest through the change of night to day, through the recurrence of the seasons, through growth and decay man, in his utter dependence upon the Universe, could not do better than follow a way which was conceived after that of nature. The only manner in which man could attain the right Way, the Tao, was by emulating the course of the Universe and completely adjust to it." (Veith 1966) This view of the world owes much to the teaching of K' Ung Fu-Tzu, Confucius, which dominated philosophical, political, social and hence medical thought from the beginning of the Han dynasty in 206 BC until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 AD. The political and social stability of the Han dynasty, which lasted for four hundred years and coincided with the Roman Empire, relied largely on the influence of the teaching of Confucius on the ruling elite. Early Confucianism was a philosophy of social order, each member of society had a duty of respect to his elders, his ancestors and his Emperor. Confucius believed that the key to good government lay in the roe of the Emperor who had the Mandate from Heaven'. As long as the Emperor was virtuous, behaved honourably and performed the rituals and sacrifices of his office, Heaven would reward the State with good harvests, good weather, good fortune in war and prosperity. Just as the movement of the Universe affected the individual, it was believed that each individual's actions affected the Universe. These ideas were reflected by the unknown authors of the collection of medical writings which were compiled into one of the seminal works on Chinese medicine, the Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor Classic of Internal Medicine) during the Later Han period (25- 221 AD) The Nei Jing builds its theoretical framework around Yin Yang and the Five Phases and it was believed that the ' health' of the individual, the health' of the State and the health' of the Universe were harmonics of each other. This was thought to be the earliest text that mentioned channel theory, ?until the discovery in 1973 of eleven medical texts written on silk in Ma Wang Dui Tomb Three, in the Hunan province. The burial is dated 168BC, but the manuscripts appear to have been written before the end of the third century BC. The theoretical foundation of these works sees disease being ?transmitted by ghosts, demons and malevolent spirits, which is in sharp contrast to the theories of the Nei Jing. Therapy included shamanistic rituals, incantations, spells and herbal prescriptions. Ideas concerning the nature of the Universe and disease changed most radically during the period from about the beginning of the Warring States Period until the Han dynasty. Shamanism was a perfectly respectable occupation until the first century AD, when it was decided that practitioners, or members of shamanic families, would be forbidden from holding public office. Confucian orthodoxy never ceased to acknowledge these practices but did tend to look down upon them. The synthesis of Confucian and Taoist ideas saw an important shift in attitudes towards the nature of disease. From being transmitted by external malevolent agents, the idea that disease resulted from internal disharmony developed to the extent that the Shen Nung P'en Cao, (Classic of the Materia Medica), first compiled no earlier than the first century AD, contains no reference to supernatural causes of disease at all. Early beliefs that disease was carried by either demons or the Wind, did form the idea of a life giving power moving through the body, which came to be known as Qi. The Han dynasty (206 BC-221 AD) was the classical period of Chinese medicine; the great masters of the time were Chang Chung Ching and Hua To. Chang Chung Ching (born c.158-166) was known as the Chinese Hippocrates. His major work The Shang Han Lun (Treatise on Cold Induced Disorders) is every bit as important as the Nei Ching. Hua To (born c.136-141) was the outstanding surgeon of the epoch and is renown for his use of anaesthetics. He is also famous for developing the Five Animal Exercises; the tiger, the stag, the bear, the monkey and the crane, which have come down to us in modern times in the form of Tai Chi Chuan. During the last century of the Han period the Nan Jing (Classic of difficult issues), which reevaluated sections of the Nei Jing was compiled. In the Nan Jing the Eight Extra Meridians are first mentioned and pulse taking from the radial artery was established. The period of chaos which followed the collapse of the Han dynasty in 211AD, saw the first appearance of Buddhism as a religious force in China. In 311 AD the Emperor was forced to leave the imperial capital Luoyang and move to Nanjing. Confucian scholars found their beliefs no longer appropriate in a society deprived of its stability. The ideas of Taoism with its practices for achieving immortality and longevity, and the rise of Buddhism with its belief that everything material is an illusion and that Nirvana or enlightenment can be achieved by retreating from the world into a life of meditation and contemplation offered better solace in an uncertain world. This period saw the population fall from 28 million to around half that figure between 200 AD and 280 AD Chinese medicine went into decline during the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368). Despite the fact that geographically China reached its greatest expansion, there were serious famines and pestilences, and the population declined from about 100 million (c.1125) to 60 million (c.1290). The Ming dynasty (1368 - 1644) ended the rule of the foreign Mongols and a capital city was built in what is now Beijing. A spectacular but sadly short lived attempt to revive classical culture followed, however the 432 years of barbarian' rule had taken its toll and culture went into decline again. Towards the end of the Ming dynasty, Li Shi Chen (1518-1593) wrote the Pen Ts'ao Kang Mu. This work in 52 volumes took 30 years to complete and lists 11,000 prescriptions. An important feature of this work is the classification of herbs by their energetic properties, taste, Yin-Yang character, direction etc. This is considered to be the piece de resistance of the modern age of traditional medicine, and some people consider it to be the only significant text to follow the Mongol age. Along side the Nei Jing, Nan Jing and the Shang Han Lun it is one of the most significant texts in Chinese medicine. The arrival of the Jesuits in China at the beginning of the 17th century, would have exposed the Chinese to Western ideas and medicine but for the Emperor Kang Hsi who, feeling that the ideas they espoused were too revolutionary, suppressed them, fearing that they might disturb the harmony of Chinese culture. For their part, a comprehensive misunderstanding of the philosophical principles of Chinese medicine by Jesuit translators prevented it from being taken seriously in the West. Although some historical sources state that it was prevalent during the earlier parts of the Ming dynasty the Chinese consider that it was the Portuguese who first brought syphilis into China. The Qing dynasty (1644 - 1911) once again brought foreign domination as the Manchu crossed the Great Wall of China and established themselves as the rulers of China. They were never assimilated by the Chinese people and this, combined with the arrival in force of Western foreign powers bent on trade' and conquest, saw Chinese medicine go into decline. 1838 marked the inauguration of the Medical Missionary Society in China whose primary purpose was to use Western medicine as a vehicle to propagate Christianity. Riding on the back of an aggressive political and economic invasion from Europe, modern Western medicine had arrived inauspiciously, in China in the seventeenth century. As the Qing dynasty went into decline during the nineteenth century, Western science and technology became, in the eyes of Chinese intellectuals, (many of whom had been to Europe to study) something considerably superior to the traditional Confucian based culture that had dominated China since the second century BC. In 1911 the Qing dynasty finally collapsed and the Kuo-Min Tang party established China's first and only Western style democracy. It became government policy to put traditional ways aside and replace them with Western ideologies. In 1914, Wang Ta-Hsieh, the head of the Ministry of Education of the newly formed Republic of China informed a delegation of practitioners of traditional medicine, "I have decided to abandon Chinese medicine from now on and not to make any use of Chinese pharmacy". It is debatable whether there was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, one identifiable body of knowledge that could confidently be put together and called orthodox Chinese medicine. Despite this, differences of opinion were put aside as hitherto disagreeing factions came together to salvage the integrity of the profession. Despite disagreement as to whether or not to try to integrate Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine, a basic theoretical framework emerged. Stripping aside shamanism and demonology, what began to emerge was a system of medicine which structured the theories of the early classics in a way which was comprehensible to modern medical establishments. The Government had intended to phase out all educational institutes teaching traditional medicine by 1929, but these plans were overtaken by the Warlord era, the Japanese invasion of 1931, the rise of the Communist party and the ensuing Civil War. Initially the Communists appeared to be in agreement with their political rivals over the fate of traditional medicine. In 1941, the Marxist T'an Chuang described traditional Chinese medicine as the collected garbage of several thousand years'. During many years of fighting against the Nationalists and the Japanese, the Communists learned to value their indigenous medicine. Unlike Stalin who sought to destroy his rural population in favour of industrialisation, Mao Tse-Dong realised the virtues of a peasant based revolution; 80% of China's population was and still is rurally based. Mao acknowledged and exploited this. One of the Communist governments most important achievement is the resurgence of traditional medicine and its amalgamation with Western medicine. Ostracised by the international community and forced into an uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union during the fifties, the Communist government of the Peoples' Republic of China were obliged to fall back on its own resources. The lack of trained Western' doctors led to a re-evaluation of Traditional medicine. This became apparent in 1958, when Mao Tse-Dung stated that "Chinese medicine is a great treasure house! We must make all efforts to uncover it and raise its standards!". Taking up the ideas already broached earlier in the century, the Chinese government set about re-assessing traditional medicine along politically correct lines. "The doctrine underlying the theory of Chinese medicine Yin/Yang and the Five Phases represent a kind of original materialism and spontaneous dialectic. They are an expression of opposition to the religious and superstitious doctrine of the existence of spirits .." Chairman Mao teaches us:?"The dialectic of antiquity, however, possesses a spontaneous, primitive character; in accordance with the social and historical conditions of the time, it could not yet assume the form of a complete theory and was unable to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the world...We must therefore strive to comprehend the original significance of the doctrines of Yin/Yang and the Five Phases and develop it critically from the perspective of dialectic and historical materialism, in order to uncover the medical treasure-house of our homeland even better". 
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