ABSTRACT
Unfortunately, from this time onwards the whole study of acupuncture in the West was bedevilled by the confusion in ten Rhijne's mind between acu-tracts and blood-vessels; veins and arteries as he frequently called them. He rightly described fourteen; the twelve regular tracts (cf. p. 44 above) plus 'Nimiakph' (Jen MOl) and 'Tokmiakph' (Tu Moz). Besides these, he knew of two additional 'external veins, that is arteries' called' Yn Kio' (Yin ching3) and' Jo Kio' (Yang ching,4 cf. Table I). Other' blood-vessels' were' Kee miak' (chhi moS)b and' Rak miak' (10 m06), the former having a 'soul' (presumably a larger proportion of chhi7), the latter not.c And here came in a singular marriage very characteristic of the + 17th century and later, the translation of Yang by the Galenic-Aristotelian 'innate heat' or calidum innatum, paralleling for Yin the 'radical' or 'primigenial, moisture', i.e. humidum radicale.d Naturally there were three types of each (Thai Yin, Yang Ming, etc.), and Willem ten Rhijne quite correctly associated them with the twelve regular chhi channels, the acu-tracts. For the rest, he said that the needles used were of gold or silver, and that they were sometimes applied heated as well as cold. To commend the needles to Westerners, he inserted a long paragraph describing their uses already customary in Greek and occidental surgery, and he ended by giving an interesting list of diseases in which acupuncture was successful, including an eye-witness account of a case of colic, senki,e suffered by a bodyguard of his own on one of the annual journeys to the capital.
