Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter.

Date:
1969
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Medicine and culture : proceedings of a historical symposium organized jointly by the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York / edited by F.N.L. Poynter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Elements. These ideas were first systematised in the school headed by Tsou Yen in the —4th century, and the doctrine of the Five Elements became later universally accepted in all branches of Chinese traditional science and technology. As is well known, these elements differ from those of the Greeks and other peoples in that they comprised not only fire, water and earth but also wood and metal. Chinese medicine, however, never lost entirely its sixfold classification, and in spite of the Five Element theory the Yin and Yang viscera ( tsang, fu) were always mustered as six of each. In view of the duodecimally based mathematics and world outlook of the Babylonians, one cannot but suspect an influence from ancient Mesopotamia on early China in this respect. It is not the only example of such an effect either. The twelve double-hours of the Chinese day and night, which go back to the beginning of Chinese culture, have long been thought to be Babylonian in origin, and some evidence has been brought forward also for close parallels in State astrology. As far as medicine is concerned, we can look for them too in another direction, namely in the very prominent part played by the conception of chhi, closely analogous to the Greek pneuma. Both words are almost untrans latable but we know that they had significations such as 'life-breath', 'subtle influence', 'gaseous emanation' and the like. Somewhat later on Chinese medical theories also dealt much with another word of very similar meaning, fêng (wind). Now Filliozat, in a classical monograph, has shown that the pneuma of Greek medicine can be matched word for word and statement by statement in the prana of the great Indian medical writers. Thus we see, as in perhaps hardly any other science except astronomy, a widespread community in high antiquity between the peripheral areas of the Old World; from Greece, through India, round to China, there is 'pneumatic medicine'. We are well aware that until now, so far as the cuneiform texts have unravelled it, Babylonian medicine has been largely magico-religious in character, but one cannot help feeling that there must have been some schools of proto-scientific medicine in Mesopotamia which bequeathed their ideas about the subtle breaths, both of normal function and pathological condition, with which the physician must contend. One cannot help feeling that some civilisation older than either Greece, India or China must have originated such conceptions and sent them out in all directions. The Iranian culture-area can hardly qualify on account of its relatively younger age, so that Mesopotamia must have been their home. Another doctrine prominent in ancient Chinese thought was that of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. A great interdependence of