Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848

by Linda L. Barnes

When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people might point to the "rediscovery" of Chinese acupuncture in the 1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts , Linda Barnes leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese understandings of illness and healing. As Westerners struggled to understand new peoples unfamiliar to them, how did they make sense of equally unfamiliar concepts and practices of healing? Barnes traces this story through the mid-nineteenth century, in both Europe and, eventually, the United States. She has unearthed numerous examples of Western missionaries, merchants, diplomats, and physicians in China, Europe, and America encountering and interpreting both Chinese people and their healing practices, and sometimes adopting their own versions of these practices. A medical anthropologist with a degree in comparative religion, Barnes illuminates the way constructions of medicine, religion, race, and the body informed Westerners' understanding of the Chinese and their healing traditions.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Dr. Linda L. Barnes is an American medical anthropologist, an Associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, and a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research specialty is religious history and the social history of Western responses to Chinese healing traditions.

Dr. Barnes received her BA in American Studies from Smith College, her Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in Comparative religion and the allied field of Medical anthropology.

Mentored by religious historian John B. Carman, Chinese religion scholar Tu Weiming, and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, her early ethnographic work centered on Chinese healing practices in the United States, particularly Boston. Her subsequent research explores the relationship between culture, religion and spirituality, and complementary and alternative medicines.

Since 1999, Dr. Barnes has been a member of the faculty of Boston University School of Medicine, where she founded and directs an urban ethnographic program—the Boston Healing Landscape Project (BHLP), an institute for the study of religions, medicines, and healing funded by the Ford Foundation. The BHLP’s research focuses on complementary and alternative medicine among the culturally complex patient communities in the Boston area.

Reviews

[littlemiao · Rating 4 out of 5]

This meticulously researched book is an essential resource for anyone interested in European encounters with and interpretations of the healing systems of China, as they changed from the thirteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century. It would be useful as a reference or springboard for further research. The sheer density of information makes it hard to read from cover to cover in a short space of time, which is what I tried and failed to do. I was surprised by the extent to which European and American doctors were practicing acupuncture in the nineteenth century, and in the later sections of the book the author includes a fascinating discussion of how Western practitioners attempted to understand the efficacy of what they were doing, given that they had little or no training in Chinese medical theory.

[Josh Buermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were two distinct periods of European interaction with Chinese healing practices that follow the contours of European colonial history: the first correspondents are Jesuit missionaries from 1552 until their political suppression across Europe and its colonies in the mid-18th century, and then protestant missionaries and merchants from (mostly) Northern Europe from the start of the 19th.

From the first exchanges Europeans tried to hammer Chinese concepts into Aristotlian philosophical boxes (p.90). Yin and yang were bowdlerized into moisture and heat. The five phases of change were equated with the four elements, with the inequality between four and five being handwaved away as a Buddhist corruption of Aristotle replacing air with metal and wood (p.56), errors that stubbornly persisted to the end of the period under study (p.255). Qi was largely ignored or equated to Galen's "animal spirits", until Harvey's demonstration of the cardiopulmonary circulation when qi became increasingly equated with circulation (p.87). A pattern emerges of the Chinese either having corrupted some authority from classical antiquity or having nothing novel to say.

This attitude changes dramatically when we shift from theory to practice. Over these three centuries European medicine shifted from making you bleed, puke, or poop according to a fortuitous arrangement of the heavens to making you bleed, puke, or poop without heeding medical astrology, but still a long ways off from appreciating the importance of making you bleed under hygienic conditions. The Chinese interventions of cupping, moxibustion, and acupuncture were comparatively uninvasive, though there's no indication that their Western enthusiasts believed that to be their advantage.

Chinese traditions capture European imaginations and go through periodic Western fads, apiece with claims that the practices originated in a common Greek or Egyptian ancestor to European practice stemming from the 'prisca theologia' assumptions of most medieval and early modern Christian Europeans that all true knowledge descends from revelation (whether via Moses in the Western tradition, or further back and farther afield for the pagans, from Noah), and the corresponding thought that their science was rediscovering knowledge lost in Mosaic revelation's subsequent corruption, a perspective that can be seen persisting into the 19th century when sinologist M.G. Pauthier declared Taoism's Three Pure Ones to be a "Chinese form of the Trinity, claiming that it showed intuitions of Christianity" (p.337), a supremacist ancestor to our many contemporary versions of 'aliens built the pyramids'.

Moxibustion was being practiced as a mild form of cauterization by European doctors by 1691 (p.113), though credit would be handed to Hippocrates (p.114) before the fad burned itself out. It later had a revival, with many European authors writing on "pryotechnical surgery" in the early 19th century (p.296-303), almost entirely alienated from its Chinese origins, and celebrated in particular by the French.

Acupuncture remained of steady Western interest from the first detailed reports of Willem ten Rhijne in 1683 through the abundant, meandering, and exceptionally un-Chinese theories for how it worked (stimulating some nerves to calm others; rebalancing humors; galvanic forces; vital fluids; magnetic fluids; electrical fluids; imponderable fluids; mesmeretic fluids; pp.193-197) to its widespread adoption such that "by 1825 most Parisian hospitals practiced acupuncture." (p.333). This might be a little ironic as Chinese sources report the declining popularity of acupuncture before Europeans had heard of it (Wang Ji in 1530, "used in less than one case in a hundred", p.58) and was outright banned by the imperial academy in 1822 (p.308).

While China practiced smallpox inoculation from the 15th century, the first observation recorded of the practice in China noted by Barnes is from the Jesuit Pierre-Martial Cibot in 1779, decades after Lady Montagu learned about the practice in Turkey and Cotton Mather from his slave Onesimus. While Alexander Pearson and translator George Staunton are usually credited with introducing Jenner's cowpox vaccination method to Canton in 1805, Barnes reports that Pearson himself credited the Portuguese crown for the first shipments of the vaccine to reach China (p.263).

Long tracts of the book, in bibliographical fashion, are dedicated to detail about the trade in Chinese herbs, and endless litany of Western efforts to acquire more ginseng and rhubarb. Buried in all this for the patient reader is a 19th century Chinese joke about Western demand for Chinese remedies, "The foreigners, if deprived for several days of tea and rhubarb, are afflicted with dimness of sight and constipation of the bowels, to such a degree that life is endangered." (p.285)

It's around the turn of the 19th century that a sect of Western healers began to see themselves as part of the scientific enterprise, or perhaps more kindly, aspire to it, as their medicine still arguably consisted of cures that worked by convincing the patient to lie and say they felt better to avoid further treatment. This new scientistic posturing lead to novel quack theories that curiously flipped the old scripts on their head, where instead of finding Western roots to Chinese medicine ('Chinese acupuncture is just corrupted Galenic bleeding') they found Chinese roots to Western pseudo-science ('Mesmer's animal magnetism is gongfu', p.205-2010), a Western practice still being infused with gibberish, from the quantum quackery of Deepak Chopra to Jordan Peterson's pseudo-archaeological belief that the Chinese legend of Fuxi and Nüwa is a "representation of DNA".

Another side effect of the scientistic fad in the closing chapters of the book is that everybody in 19th century Western medicine became electrified with, well, electricity. I opened this book because I wanted to fully appreciate the irony that the Western 70s acupuncture revival was premised on the idea that Western medicine was too chauvinistic to have ever taken acupuncture seriously, but by the time the book is coming to a close Western adoption of acupuncture had transmuted it, "A whole branch of Westernized acupuncture persisted, therefor, in the form of electro-puncture."

I guess we'll have to wait for the sequel to find out what became of it.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is book is quite simply the best history book about China I’ve read in at least a year if not longer. It has such strong and in-depth analysis, a great use of sources, a thorough understanding of European and Chinese history, philosophy, religion, and medicine. I got it on interlibrary loan for the parts that overlapped with my book of the month but found myself wanting to read the whole thing, and get my own copy as it is such an amazing book for reference as well that I know I’ll be looking back in it for years to come. Chinese medicine is not one of the areas I’m particularly interested in about China, but this book does an excellent job of looking at the differences between early European medicine and Chinese medicine and how the two were attempting to interpret the other. It doesn’t take the view that one type was “right” and the other “wrong”, neither does she take them as static, but looks at the different beliefs and practices of the different time periods. The parts that I found the most interesting were looking at the religious role of healing, including exorcisms, and physical healing. It was interesting to see the way that different Taoist and Buddhist techniques were interpreted by the Europeans in China. She also looks not just at the Jesuit or religious sources, but also those of politicians, traders as well as Western physicians. Without a doubt I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the relationships between China and Europe, culture-clashes, Chinese medicine, the history of medicine, and the relationship between medicine, magic, and religion. All around a fantastic read which I can’t find a single thing to criticise.

[Suvi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Asian Studies