The Long History of Chinese Medicine–Briefly

By Michael Sano
I can smell the faint traces of ginger, cardamom, and anise wafting from the door beside me. I could be searching for lunch in Chinatown, but instead I’m in the ACTCM clinic waiting for an acupuncture treatment.

The entrance to the herbal dispensary is right off the clinic lobby, where more than 300 herbs are stored. Rows of wooden drawers contain herbs both dried and pulverized for teas and concoctions.

For those who prefer a more convenient and less flavorful prescription, there are also shelves of bottles: herbal formulas prepackaged in pill form. As it has been doing for more than 3,000 years, this is one example of how Chinese medicine has adapted to treat the modern patient.

Chinese medicine has a long history covered in much detail in ACTCM’s History of Healing and Medicine class. In the course, students follow Chinese medicine across the Pacific to America. The medicine likely arrived with the first groups of Chinese immigrants to reach California, when it was still under Spanish rule. But the first records of its practice, however, particularly outside of Chinese enclaves, are found alongside the wave of Chinese laborers who immigrated to work on the U.S. transcontinental railroad.

In Oregon, tourists can get a glimpse of this history at the Kam Wah Chung museum, originally built in 1871 as a general store and Chinese medical center. Doc Hay, the co-proprietor and resident acupuncturist, treated American settlers out of the center during the Spanish flu outbreak of 1918. According to local lore, all of Doc Hay’s patients survived, an impressive statistic against a 10%-20% reported mortality rate in other parts of the world.

There are also records of other Chinese medicine practitioners successfully treating small numbers of patients outside of Chinatowns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But it was in 1971 that the journalist James Reston exposed the whole U.S. to acupuncture with an article in The New York Times covering his emergency appendectomy in China.

“Now, About My Operation in Peking” tells the story of Reston’s surgery at the Peking Union Medical College and how doctors used acupuncture and herbal medicine for postoperative care. At the time of Reston’s surgery, a huge corps of doctors was being trained across China to serve a largely rural populace. The giant scope of this training led to the formation of what is now known as Traditional Chinese Medicine-a national unifi­cation of various systems of medicine practiced in China over millennia.

A year after Reston’s story hit the news­stands, four UCLA students became the first known Westerners to study Chinese medicine in the United States. They stud­ied under Dr. Ju Gim Shek, nicknamed Dr. Kim, in a Hollywood strip mall at what became known as the Institute of Taoist Studies. One of these students, Stephen Rosenblatt, traveled to Hong Kong with Dr. Kim and became the first Westerner admitted to the Hong Kong Acupuncture College. He later went on to found the New England School of Acupuncture.

That same year-1972-with the founding of the first U.S. acupuncture organization, the education of Chinese medicine expanded to include Western doctors and dentists. Soon after, states began enacting laws in regard to the training and practice of acupuncturists. Oregon was the first, followed quickly by Nevada and Maryland. Today, 44 states and the District of Columbia have licensed more than 27,000 practitioners of Chinese medicine.