pp. 51-55:
Dr Paul Unschuld of the University of Munich is the leading Western authority on the history of Chinese medicine. He has said the origins of Traditional Chinese Medicine as we know it today actually lie in the very recent past, and TCM is a ‘misnomer for an artificial system of health care ideas and practices generated between 1950 and 1975 by committees in the People’s Republic of China’. Unschuld describes how, after the communist revolution, the vast and heterogeneous Chinese medical heritage was restructured to fit Marxist-Maoist principles. Crucially, TCM was needed to maintain social and political control in a country beset by poverty and with fewer than twenty thousand scientifically trained doctors, mostly practising in big cities, to serve a predominantly rural population of around six hundred million. Ancient practices were selectively cherry-picked, with many elements reinterpreted, in order to ‘build a future of meaningful coexistence of modern Western and traditional Chinese ideas and practices’. [13]
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Straightforward pragmatism would produce a consolidated medicine that could satisfy the nation’s health needs and it was Mao himself who enabled the modified version of the traditional medicine to be saved. Certainly, his own doctor, in a controversial 1995 biography, describes Mao as rejecting it when ill and saying ‘even though I believe we should promote Chinese medicine, I personally do not believe in it. I don’t take Chinese medicine’. [18]
Mao’s ideas took shape in the slogan ‘the scientification of Chinese medicine and popularisation of Western medicine’ which was to dominate Chinese medical policy in subsequent years. In post-revolutionary China The New Acupuncture by scientifically trained doctor Zhu Lian became the principal acupuncture manual and placed Maoist propaganda at acupuncture’s heart. [19] Though interest acupuncture had dwindled in the first half of the twentieth century, Zhu Lian believed that it had the right qualities, both practical and political, to serve the Chinese Communist Party. She completed the book in 1949 just as the Communists finally won the civil war and, as Kim Taylor demonstrated, uses military and administrative metaphors throughout. Shu Lian’s acupuncture diagrams show the body in divisions or parts rather than the integrated whole it had been represented as in the past. For the first time acupuncture points are arranged in divisions and straight lines. ‘Internal body parts are ascribed a bureaucratic role in the functioning unit of the body, with the heart ascribed the role of ruler, the lung that of ministers, and so on, in hierarchical order.’ The New Acupuncture is full of these administrative and political metaphors to the extent that ‘a direct image of the Chinese Communist Party has been superimposed on the body,’ says Taylor.
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The standardised new acupuncture developed in the 1950s was formally disseminated through the textbooks given to the ‘barefoot doctors’ and other students of TCM. Crucially, these were the acupuncture manuals that were translated into English and became the basis of the acupuncture taught and performed outside China, such as the Barefoot Doctors Manual published in America in 1977. [21]
13. Interview with Dr Paul Unschuld, Acupuncture Today, 2004
18. Zhisui Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The inside story of the man who made modern China, Chatto and Windus, 1994
19. Shu Lian, 2nd edition of The New Acupuncture, People’s Medical Publishers, 1954
21. Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, English translation of the official Chinese paramedical textbook, Running Press, 1977
p. 63:
Ear acupuncture was invented in the 1950s by a French doctor working in Lyons called Paul Nogier. The rather implausible story goes that Nogier encountered several people who claimed to have been cured of sciatica after having their ears cauterised by healers (known as guerissseurs) in Marseilles. This somehow led him to theorise that the ear was in some way correlated to every other part of the body. It is thought that the Chinese learned of Dr Nogier’s work and then developed their own auricular mappings. ‘This correspondence system was easy to teach “barefoot doctor” acupuncture technicians to readily assimilate into their paramedical practices,’ according to the American journal of Medical Acupuncture. [52] Dr George Ulett has noted that the vagus nerve, which is linked to all the major body organs, supplies the central sections of the ear, but this anatomical fact may be irrelevant since there is little research evidence for the efficacy of ear acupuncture anyway. [53]
52. Bryan I. Frank and Nader Soliman, ‘Shen Men: a critical assessment through advanced auricular therapy’, Medical Acupuncture Physicians’ Journal, 1998
53. George A. Ulett and SongPin Han, The Biology of Acupuncture, Warren H Green Inc, 2002
