Traditional Medicine in Modern China

Part five: Anthropological research on the hot‐cold theory of disease: Some methodological suggestions

“…Although the importance of humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), and their associated polar concepts of temperature (hot-cold) and moisture (dry-wet), are very much apparent in the writings of early Greek physicians (Inglis 1965;Lloyd 1962Lloyd , 1964, there is evidence that the humoral theory of binary opposition originally developed in Vedic India (Filliozat 1964;Inglis 1965;Silverberg 1966;Venzmer 1972), or perhaps even earlier in ancient China (Croizier 1968;Huard and Wong 1968).…”

Hong Kong homeopathy: How it arrived and how it connected with Chinese medicine

“…Since the dawn of the 20th century, there has been a strong call for scientizing and standardizing traditional Chinese medicine. 12 After 1949, universities specialized in teaching this branch of knowledge were purposefully built in various cities in Mainland China, providing the most authoritative medical training to practitioners of traditional medicine.…”

Neither Donkey nor Horse

“…From the time that Joseph Needham first began compiling his research on science and civilization in China in the 1950s, traditional Chinese medicine has consistently emerged as an ideological "other" to the dominating epistemological reach of Western science. Ralph Croizier's (1968) pioneering study on Traditional medicine in modern China followed in the footsteps that Needham carved out. Arguing that medicine was the one epistemological preserve that resisted the encroachment of Western science, Croizier depicted Chinese medicine as a bastion of cultural nationalism and a mainstay of indigenous intellectual tradition.…”