Traditional Chinese Medicine by Paul U. Unschuld

Author:Paul U. Unschuld
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

14

THE PERSUASIVENESS OF WESTERN MEDICINE

Already by the eighteenth century, several stimuli had occurred that might have encouraged the Chinese to engage with European medicine. The French priest Father Parennin had prepared detailed anatomical plates for the Emperor Kangxi in 1722; the emperor immediately rejected them as unsuitable, so the original illustrations were sent back to France and may now be consulted in a Paris library. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, surgeons of the Dutch East India Company sought out contact with indigenous healers while they were stationed at Macao. At this time they were not burdened with a feeling of superiority: that came only after the 1830s.

The first revolution in European medicine came with the development of modern anesthetic methods, facilitating new surgical techniques. Shortly thereafter, knowledge of the chemical basis for active pharmacological principles set in motion the new pharmacology with its mass production of reliably effective drugs. Finally, the discovery of the causes of disease allowed for the possibility of therapies that could attack them directly inside the body and suggested external preventive measures before they reached the body.

At around the same time, Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) published his book on “cellular pathology,” thereby initiating research leading to the long-awaited synthesis between morphological findings and their chemical and physical significance for health and disease.

All of these changes occurred within half a century. The conceptual difference between modern European medicine near the end of the nineteenth century and its forerunner of the 1830s was of the same order of magnitude as the difference between the ubiquitous use of smart phones, tablet computers, and the Internet today and the use of slate tablets, soapstone pencils, and sponge erasers in schools as recently as the 1950s.

It is hard to imagine the level of enthusiasm for science that gripped the entire population at that time, since nowadays there are increasing questions about the legitimacy of modern medicine’s exclusive attention to a physico-chemical worldview that focuses only on the material structures of the human organism. One must make an effort to put oneself in that environment in order to understand the increasing self-confidence with which doctors of Western medicine ventured out into the world, including to China, where they looked down condescendingly on the prescientific therapies of non-Western peoples. From the other side, many Chinese observers were gripped with the same enthusiasm.

Starting from the 1830s, British and American missionary societies promoted extra medical education for their missionaries, as a way of protecting their health and promoting their survival in the frequently insalubrious environments, beyond the reach of Western civilization, in which they were sent to work. In China it soon became clear that missionaries’ medical knowledge gained more attention and created greater demand from the local population than evangelizing for the Christian gospel alone. Christianity appeared largely incomprehensible, whereas when Chinese encountered missionary medicine, it seemed much less strange. Minor surgical interventions were the most persuasive, as the relationship between intervention and effect was obvious to even lay observers.

A few of the

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