ABSTRACT
In 1900 China was known as ‘the sick man of Asia.’ Racked by foreign predations and civil rebellions, the weakened Qing dynasty was ailing and so too were its subjects. Physicians in imperial China frequently complained of the ignorance that led the families of sick people to call in a priest or a ‘quack’ rather than a proper physician. By the beginning of the twentieth century Chinese learned medicine faced an even more dangerous threat than superstition and poverty. In the 1950s the Chinese government lacked hard currency to purchase proprietary biomedical drugs from abroad, so it urged researchers to develop substitutes made from local products wherever possible. At the same time it encouraged research into the chemical properties of Chinese drugs and prescriptions, as part of a drive to provide scientific validation for traditional medicine. While traditional Chinese medicine remains a dubious ‘alternative’ in the West, in China it is on the way to remoulding the science of medicine.
