Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China

Description

The author presents an ethnography that seeks to answer the secret of Chinese medicine's remarkable adaptability that has allowed it to prosper for over 2000 years. - By Volker Scheid (20020 407 pages

(Reviewed by Bob Flaws, Lac)

Volker Scheid’s new book, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis, is a significant read for anyone interested in the practice and development of Chinese medicine during the last hundred years. Volker is a German-born practitioner of Chinese medicine as well as a medical anthropologist at the University of London. While many acupuncturists might find this book somewhat difficult to read due to its academic jargon, I believe it is well worth the effort. This book is the clearest and most complete explanation I have read of the various factors influencing the development of Chinese medicine in Republican, Maoist, Dengist, and contemporary China. Since its publication, there is no longer any excuse for much of the mythological thinking about Chinese medicine in the West.

Volker’s central premise is that the development of Chinese medicine in China is and always has been a multifactorial process that cannot be reduced to any of the simplistic assumptions commonly bandied about by modernist anthropologists and Western practitioners of Chinese medicine. Essentially, this is postmodernist complexity theory applied to the ethnography of Chinese medicine (with small amounts of Yi Jing and the Buddhist theory of codependent origination). As such, it appears to be cutting edge social science. Volker attempts to elucidate the complex variety of factors that affect the practice and development of Chinese medicine through a series of “case histories.” These case histories deal with the bi-directional relationships of Chinese medicine and its practitioners with the Chinese government, patients, Western medicine, educational institutions, the Chinese medical literature, social networks, technology, and the marketplace. While these case histories support Volker’s postmodernist thesis, they are also enlightening descriptions of the state of Chinese medicine in the People’s Republic of China, and what life is like for a contemporary Chinese doctor. Even though I have lived and studied in China, I had no knowledge of some of the behind-the-scenes factors influencing Chinese doctors’ words and actions. Likewise, even though I read Chinese, Volker’s erudition in the Chinese medical literature is extraordinary.

As Volker himself counsels, non-anthropological readers may want to skip part 1 which presents Volker’s theory of codependent origination. However, part 2 on the state of contemporary Chinese medicine and part 3 on the future of Chinese medicine are more than worth the price of this book. Anyone attached to his or her current assumptions about contemporary Chinese medicine should probably not read this book, but for anyone interested in a mature, complex, but thoroughly human and humane discussion, this book is an eye-opener.

Date reviewed

22/12/2002

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