textbooks, Ministry of Health

[Guest guest]

Dear CHA,

 

Can anyone of you recommend Chinese medicine

practitioners in the Cincinatti and Savannah areas for

a patient with progressive supranuclear palsy? This

request was tacked on to the end of one of my earlier

messages and many of you may not have seen it.

 

Doug, returning to the question of textbook

production, here are a few more thoughts that might

help. There were some very specific pressures on

Chinese medicine doctors during these eras that I

haven’t mentioned in my earlier messages. One

important distinction in the early Communist era was

between the Ministry of Health and the Communist Party

itself. The former was dominated by biomedical

specialists and was quite hostile to Chinese medicine;

the latter was much more receptive to Chinese

medicine, perhaps because of the base experience in

Yan’an or because of their more pragmatic outlook

regarding China’s limited health professional

resources at the time. (Of course, the Communists had

their own agenda to “reform” Chinese medicine, but at

least they didn’t want to eliminate it.) There were

important clashes in the 1950s between these two

groups. The party ultimately prevailed and several

leading members of the Ministry of Health were forced

out. My recollection is a little rusty at the moment,

but I believe these clashes were (at least partially)

responsible for the delays in setting up Chinese

medicine institutes and the writing of textbooks, none

which got going until the mid 1950s or later. Today,

Chinese medicine has its own administrative body now

which helps insulate it from some lingering prejudice

among M of H bureaucrats. There are several

interesting books that touch of some of these

political issues that you might want to check out. I

recommend two books: David Lampton’s, _The Politics of

Medicine in China_ and Kim Taylor’s _Medicine of

Revolution_. (Lampton’s book is out of print, but

available in university libraries; Kim’s book just

came out a couple years ago and is very strong on

examining these tensions.)

 

In the Republican era, the Ministry of Health was even

more hostile towards Chinese medicine. You are

probably familiar with the famous attempt by Yu

Yunxiu, member of the Ministry of Health, to ban the

practice of Chinese medicine altogether in 1929. His

proposed bill was not passed by the legislature, but

the effects of the proposal on the Chinese medicine

community were quite profound nonetheless. There are

two excellent Ph. D. dissertations that address this

topic with great sophistication – Bridie Andrew’s _The

Making of Modern _ and Hsiang-Lin

Lei’s, _When Encountered the State_.

Unfortunately, they may be hard to find (check UMI

abstracts, if you are interested in purchasing them).

Ralph Croizier’s, _Traditional Medicine in Modern

China_ is the classic on this topic. It’s out of

print, but also available in good university

libraries.

 

To my knowledge, the Ministry of Health officials

usually did not have a direct impact on the writing of

Chinese medicine textbooks. (This is somewhat less

true in the Communist era, but the influences were

actually considered beneficial by most of the editors

that I was able to speak with.) But the hostile

environment that they helped to create and perpetuate

certainly had a strong influence of the scholars who

were writing textbooks. So the influence was there,

but it was primarily indirect. If you look back at

Republican era scholarship in Chinese medicine, a

great deal of it was oriented towards explaining

Chinese medicine in terms of Western medicine. Even

Ren Yingqiu, one of the most revered modern scholars

of Chinese medicine and ardent defender of Chinese

medicine, got his start doing this kind of highly

“integrationist” sort of work back in the 1930s. I

think these scholars saw this new hybrid type of

scholarship as the only way forward at the time. This

desire to integrate Chinese medicine with Western

medicine has ebbed and flowed over the 20th century,

but it has been far stronger than most outside

observers have recognized. Foreign students of Chinese

medicine, like most of us in this discussion group,

have come to Chinese medicine seeking the most unique

aspects of the medical practice that distinguish it

from biomedicine. But most Chinese medicine doctors in

China (including the textbook editors) have been much

more keenly aware of relationship between the two

medical systems – sometimes seeking to mark the

differences between the two but other times trying to

bring them together. The results have been

complicated.

 

I hope this helps.

Eric

 

 

 

 

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[Guest guest]

Eric,

 

I don't know much about the history of the ministry of health towards

CM in the past, but I am under the impression that the current PRC

ministry of health is pretty supportive of Chinese medicine. If I'm

not mistaken, the Ministry of Health is the ultimate body above the

State Administration of TCM (SATCM), which puts out some nice textbook

sets and many other books, and also funds lots of research and other

organizations and institutions. I know that the World Federation of

Societies runs underneath SATCM and the Ministry of

Health, and I think that there is still a close connection between the

Ministry of Health and the former gov't monopoly medical publisher,

Renmin Weisheng Chubanshe (PMPH). PMPH was once dominated by WM

professionals, but the current president is an experienced older TCM

doctor. I know the PMPH president and I am under the impression that

he is well-connected with the Ministry of Health, and I think they are

quite supportive of expanding CM internationally. From everything I

can tell, the current Chinese Ministry of Health is doing quite a lot

to promote Chinese medicine, but of course that might just be a recent

trend (I know little about the history, as I've said).

 

Eric Brand

[Guest guest]

Eric,

 

I think you're right about current relations between

the Ministry of Health and the State Administration of

Traditional , at least at the

institutional level. The SATCM folks that I have met

complain about the condescending attitude of MoH

people in their administrative interactions. So I

suspect there are probably mixed views about Chinese

medicine at the MoH at a personal level (biomedicine

doctors in China are not much better than biomedical

doctors here in terms of their openness to CM). But

they all faithfully toe the party line in the everyday

work. The PMPH is an interesting (counter)example, but

then they are in the business of selling books.

 

For those of you interested in Republican and late

imperial history of Chinese medicine, I should also

mention Volker's new book, which I am sure will be

excellent on these subjects. I'm not sure if it is out

yet. It was originally slated to come out last year.

 

Eric

 

 

 

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