Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care)

This book should be required for all first year students of Chinese medicine. Unschuld places the medicine in its cultural and historical context. A picture is painted of not just one unchanging China, but of a geographical area that went through many important changes over time, all of which influenced the medicine. The theories and practices that modern Chinese medicine uses today represent a few pieces of a big and complicated puzzle. This book will help you find many of the missing pieces.

On the face of it, a book on the history of Chinese medicine may sound about as interesting as watching paint dry. But this excellent book is riveting. It tells a story with many parallels in the West: medicine is heavily influence by the society in which it is practiced. How we think about people, how to keep them healthy and how to heal them, is a reflection of the prevailing understanding of the time. If you believe that the world is a magical place containing angels and demons then illness may be seen as demonic and its cure as the action of an angel. If, as is common today, the human being is thought of as no more than a biochemical machine, then that's the way that medicine operates. Paul Unschuld is a remarkably erudite historian from the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Munich. The book is a largely successful attempt to explain the history of Chinese medical theories by positioning them within the belief systems in which they developed. Beginning with beliefs rooted in demonology, traditional Chinese medicine continued to evolve as Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist and the Marxist beliefs held sway. What is remarkable abut Chinese medicine is its resilience: each new wave of theory became incorporated and complemented everything that came before. The book's central theme is expressed through three elements that have informed the theory and practice of Chinese medicine. First is the idea of magical correspondences. So an illness may occur because an albino calf was born in the village. The second is the empirical, practical medicine that has been developed by every culture: folk knowledge of herbs and other remedies that aid in the treatment of disease. The third is the construction of a body of professional knowledge by physicians and pharmacists. This includes the medicine of systematic correspondences that is used by many traditional practitioners to this day, when they speak of five elements, the twelve organs and different forms of Qi. Over the last five decades this system has continued to evolve in China, with the introduction of ever more Western concepts into the traditional framework of medicine. If you are interested in the history of ideas and the development of an extraordinary system of healing, this book is an excellent and surprisingly readable resource.

I realy don't know what book the above reviewer read before writing their review, but it certainly appears not to have been this one. Unschuld's premise is that any medicine MUST be understood within the context of the intellectual and cultural history out of which it arises, and not judged or even atempted to be understood from the intellectual and cultural framework of another culture seeking to understand the medicine only. Therefore, students of Traditional Chinese Medicine MUST study Chinese culture, history, and intellectual thought in order to fully understand the emdicine itself. Otherwise it is just a haphazard grab bag of clever techniques, at best. He intends his book to be a start n that direction, giving an overview of Chinese political, cultural, religious, and intellectual history, and attempting to show how this rich history of ideas manifested within the field of Chinese medicine from the earliest oracle bones and shamanic healers to the current attempt under Communism to develop a pragmatic system of primary care totally divorced from the spiritual context that gave birth to its world view and concepts. This is not a book for the casual reader who wants to learn a little bit about acupuncture. It is, however, a book serious students of Chinese Medicine ought to be thoroughly familiar with.