This book offers a comprehensive overview of the crucial second stage in the evolution of Chinese medicine by examining the changes during the pivotal era of the Song dynasty.
In covering the subject of Chinese medicine, this book addresses topics such as oracle bones, the treatment of women, fertility and childbirth, nutrition, acupuncture, and Qi as well as examining Chinese medicine as practiced globally in places such as Africa, Australia, Vietnam, Korea, and the United States.
An innovative, deeply researched history of Chinese medicine in America and the surprising interplay between Eastern and Western medical practice Chinese medicine has a long history in the United States, with written records dating back to the American colonial period. In this intricately crafted history, Tamara Venit Shelton chronicles the dynamic systems of knowledge, therapies, and materia medica crossing between China and the United States from the eighteenth century to the present. Chinese medicine, she argues, has played an important and often unacknowledged role in both facilitating and undermining the consolidation of medical authority among formally trained biomedical scientists in the United States. Practitioners of Chinese medicine, as racial embodiments of “irregular” medicine, became useful foils for Western physicians struggling to assert their superiority of practice. At the same time, Chinese doctors often embraced and successfully employed Orientalist stereotypes to sell their services to non-Chinese patients skeptical of modern biomedicine. What results is a story of racial constructions, immigration politics, cross-cultural medical history, and the lived experiences of Asian Americans in American history.
Medical care in nineteenth-century China was spectacularly pluralistic: herbalists, shamans, bone-setters, midwives, priests, and a few medical missionaries from the West all competed for patients. This book examines the dichotomy between "Western" and "Chinese" medicine, showing how it has been greatly exaggerated. As missionaries went to lengths to make their medicine more acceptable to Chinese patients, modernizers of Chinese medicine worked to become more "scientific" by eradicating superstition and creating modern institutions. Andrews challenges the supposed superiority of Western medicine in China while showing how "traditional" Chinese medicine was deliberately created in the image of a modern scientific practice.
The English edition of Liu Lihong’s milestone work is a sublime beacon for the profession of Chinese medicine in the 21st century. Classical Chinese Medicine delivers a straightforward critique of the politically motivated “integration” of traditional Chinese wisdom with Western science during the last sixty years, and represents an ardent appeal for the recognition of Chinese medicine as a science in its own right. Professor Liu’s candid presentation has made this book a bestseller in China, treasured not only by medical students and doctors, but by vast numbers of non-professionals who long for a state of health and well-being that is founded in a deeper sense of cultural identity. Oriental medicine education has made great strides in the West since the 1970s, but clear guidelines regarding the “traditional” nature of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) remain undefined. Classical Chinese Medicine not only delineates the educational and clinical problems faced by the profession in both East and West, but transmits concrete and inspiring guidance on how to effectively engage with ancient texts and designs in the postmodern age. Using the example of the Shanghanlun (Treatise on Cold Damage), one of the most important Chinese medicine classics, Liu Lihong develops a compelling roadmap for holistic medical thinking that links the human body to nature and the universe at large.
In the first comprehensive and analytical study of therapeutic concepts and practices in China, Paul Unschuld traced the history of documented health care from its earliest extant records to present developments. This edition is updated with a new preface which details the immense ideological intersections between Chinese and European medicines in the past 25 years.
In this book, we endeavor to introduce readers to the cultural background, origins and historical development of traditional Chinese medicine. We surveyed the most important events in its long history and the conditions that influenced its development, including the cultural and philosophical ideas and assumptions that led to the development of the particular methods and techniques of healing that characterize Chinese medicine. Our goal is not to give an exhaustive survey of the history and philosophy of Chinese medicine, but rather to convey the patterns of its development and allow readers to gain an understanding of the distinctive features of traditional Chinese medicine.
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) originated from the traditional medical system in the Chinese civilization, with influences from the Daoist and Chinese folk traditions in bodily cultivation and longevity techniques. In the past few decades, TCM has become one of the leading alternative medical systems in the United States. This book demonstrates the fluidity of a medical ideological system with a rich history of methodological development and internal theoretical conflicts, continuing to transform in our postmodern world where people and ideas transcend geographic, ethnic, and linguistic limitations. The unique historical trajectories and cultural dynamics of the American society are crticial nutrients for the localization of TCM, while the constant traffic of travelers and immigrants foster the globalizing tendency of TCM. The practitioners in this book represent an incredible range of clinical applications, personal styles, theoretical rationalizations, and business models. What really unifies all these practitioners is not their specific practices but the goal of these practices. The shared goal is to strive for health, not just health in terms of the lack of illness but the ultimate health of achieving perfect balance in every aspect of the being of a person—physically, mentally, spiritually, and energetically.