ABSTRACT
In 1982, philosopher Renzong Qiu published a review article in the fi rst number of the new journal Metamedicine. His topic was “Philosophy of Medicine in China, 1930-1980” (Qiu 1982). As a professional philosopher working for the Chinese government’s major social research institute, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), he sought to bring to the attention of an English-reading academic public the theoretical and policy debates that had swirled around the fi eld of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) during the 20th century. Of necessity, and recognizing the recent international interest in “medicine and philosophy,” he distinguished between the natural philosophy that had informed the specialized knowledge of medicine in China for at least 2,000 years and the recently formalized discipline of philosophy of medicine (Qiu 1982: 36). (I will return to “natural philosophy” below.)
Qiu’s article shows that the philosophy of medicine in China, which included both academic philosophy and medical theory-building, was an especially lively field in 1982. There was a complex history of intellectual and institutional struggle, dating from the 1920s, between those who sought to replace indigenous medical practices with modern biomedicine and the experts of “traditional” medicine who fought to maintain the value of their field (Lei 2014). Debates had turned at mid-century from merely factual or natural scientific matters to include “philosophical foundations.” The journal Yixue yu zhexue ( Medicine and Philosophy ) began publishing in Chinese in 1980, just two years after the journal Medicine and Philosophy was inaugurated in the United States. Many of the Chinese journal’s articles explored the logical and ontological character of TCM through readings of specific bodies of literature, drawn from a vast archive spanning several thousand years.
