The Transmission of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, Series Number 7)

Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology

by Elisabeth Hsu

This is a study of traditional medical education in the People's Republic of China. The author became a disciple of a scholarly private practitioner, a Qigong master; attended courses given by a senior acupuncturist and masseur; and studied with undergraduates at the Yunnan College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where the standardized knowledge of official Chinese medicine is inculcated. She compares theories and practices of these different Chinese medical traditions, and her fascinating insider's account of traditional medical practices brings out the way in which the context of instruction shapes knowledge.

308 pages, Paperback

First published November 10, 1995

Reviews

[Scott]

Elisabeth Hsu wrote an article in Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, in 2000, called Spirit (SHEN), Styles or Knowing , and Authority in Contemporary Chinese Medicine. The article is a summary of her book from 1999, The Transmission of Chinese Medicine, (Cambridge University Press.) I got the article free through Interlibrary Loan if you are just interested in ideas, but I recommend the book too.

The book tells a cool story. In Kunming, in the late 1980's Hsu signed up to study three different forms of Chinese medicine and compared how they were transmitted. She did this as a medical anthropologist, in other words, she was always looking beyond the subject she was studying to a larger field of knowledge. This is how good social thought gets produced.

First she signed up to study TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) at a government college which taught clinical medicine in a TCM Hospital. Then she found a qigong master, who did treatments on difficult cases. Finally, she found a teacher of the Neijing (Inner Classic of Medicine), really a "doctor's doctor", who had completed his studies before the two big changes in Chinese Medicine took place; the first being the invention of Clinical TCM and the other being the Cultural Revolution.

What she found is that each style of transmission uses the Term SHEN very differently. These differences have profound implications for how these various types of practitioners assert authority and make claims about what is real.Qi Healing Power

1. Clinical TCM: Shen is a list of observations that correspond closely with what we call functions of the brain in Bio-medicine (you know regular modern medicine.)

2. Qigong Master: Shen is a very vague idea, no one seems to be able to define it, yet people agree that it is what improves (or doesn't improve) with a series of qigong treatment performances.

3. The Neijing expert: Shen means different things in different parts of the text. The teachers uses the text which is often metaphorical or obscure, to impart his traditional knowledge and extensive experience about medicine. Thus the teacher asserts some authority about what Shen means at any one time, or in a particular context. Hsu calls this quality of having multiple meanings polysemous.

[Layla Bing]

I bought this book for a college anthropology class on Asian medical systems. Hsu's groundbreaking work-- the first ethnographic survey to simultaneously study three different forms of medical education-- is an anthropological examination of the various ways in which both ancient and modern Chinese medical knowledge is spread (or alternatively, withheld) in modern times. It is definitely not something I would have picked up on my own or read for fun; but I certainly found it interesting in the context of learning about Chinese medical anthropology, particularly as Hsu intersperses her more abstract epistemological conclusions with first person observation of real Chinese medical practitioners and interesting background on the medical tradition itself.

The Transmission of Chinese Medicine is divided into three parts that reflect the three different modes of knowledge transmission that characterize Chinese medical education: the secret mode of transmission, the personal mode of transmission, and the standardized mode of transmission. In each section, Hsu calls on her personal experiences as an ethnographer and her observations of each of the modes of transmission. In her section on the secret transmission of knowledge, she cites her observations of the qigong practitioner, Qiu and his interactions with his brother-in-law and disciple, Qiudi. In the personal transmission chapters Hsu cites her own experience as a student in the class of Doctor Zhang where she participated first-hand in the personal, interpretative transmission of knowledge. Finally, the standardized transmission section is comprised of Hsu's interpretations of the formal interviews and surveys she conducted, as well as her own observations of medical education at the Yunnan TCM College. Each section is further subdivided into headings giving further information of interest on a procedural level, as well as thematic and subject headings which break the wealth of observation into digestibly packaged information bytes. In this way Hsu makes main points easily understandable by packaging each conclusion within the context of its supporting observation.

The Transmission of Chinese Medicine is, in short, a lucid and insightful foray into the way in which the different modes of transmission of Chinese medical knowledge affect the way in which Chinese medicine is understood as a system, a tradition, and a modern medical force. I recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in the field.