Medicine in China - Literature, Doctrines, Therapy, Modernization, Bibliography
practices chinese traditional classical
"Classical Chinese medicine" refers to the cumulative practices and abstract doctrines passed down by a small literate minority in China beginning in the first century B.C.E. As in any traditional society, this elite knowledge has made up only a small part of China's health care practices, which include self-therapy, family therapy, and ritual and religious curing. Since 1949, as these elements have changed and their balance has shifted, state-regulated medical practice has come gradually to be divided between biomedicine and a greatly modernized form of the classical art generally called traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM, and hybrids of the two.
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In most of early medieval Europe, only a few classical medical treatises survived, primarily in the libraries of monastic institutions, and most medical practitioners had little education. The outcome was a split between theory and practice. In China there was no such split. Almost all of the literature, including works on doctrinal foundations, was written by practitioners. The Inner Canon define…
Biomedicine had little influence on health care in China until after 1949. At that point there were too few qualified personnel to provide basic medical care for the whole population. The government of the People's Republic organized a network of schools to train doctors of traditional Chinese medicine (Zhongyi) and a system of modern medical schools. Both trained secondary-school graduates…
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