ABSTRACT
As Chinese traditional medicine becomes known and used throughout the world, a world in which 'modern', 'western', 'scientific' or 'bio-medicine' is accorded supremacy, its position at that interface is a somewhat movable feast. Medical texts from various Asian traditions, including the Chinese, were making their way east along the silk road to Arabia and onward to Europe from at least the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. When European scholars and practitioners began investigating early Western publications on Chinese medicine, its iconic technique was, as it remains, pulse diagnosis. Pulse diagnosis generated great interest in Europe. In an 1841 Principles of Medicine, a Dr. Billing tells us the tongue is naturally white before food, red after, pale from anaemia and both red and dry with dysentery, TB, and typhoid. The roots of the theories of Chinese medicine lie in ancient texts, and their descriptions of what might term the spiritual, the magical, the astrological and the philosophical.
