ABSTRACT
After this, the whole of the Chhing period constitutes nothing so much as an anticlimax in this field. When Hsti Ling-Thai I wrote his interesting survey of the history of Chinese medicine in + 1757, he had to speak of acupuncture as rather a lost art, for there were then left very few experts in it, and young physicians were at a loss to find teachers who could instruct them in it. And yet it never died out altogether. Hsii Ling-Thai listed the many ways in which failures could have come about, insufficient attention to the proper time at which it should be done, carelessness in the selection of the acu-point to be used and its inexact localisation, finally inattention to the way the needle should be inserted and the hand-movements which should be applied to it. Moxibustion fared much better, and in the +18th century there were a good many practitioners using it,a but pharmacy and oral medication were overwhelmingly dominant at this time, and when scholars like Hsii surveyed the ancient and medieval literature they were astonished to see how great a part acupuncture had played in it. A number of reasons have been given for the decline of the art. Perhaps from the beginning of the Manchu regime onwards an upsurge of vulgar Confucianism encouraged a fear of doing damage to the sacred body bestowed on one by one's parents; and to this misplaced filial piety the same trend added a strangely Victorian prudery, since acupuncture and moxa required the baring of the body, and this was anathema to the ultra-Confucian moralists.b Perhaps these influences were something of a distorted nationalist reaction to the foreign-ness of the Manchu ruling classes. In any case the nadir was reached in 1822, when an edict forbade the teaching of these subjects in the Imperial Medical College, the Thai I Yuan,2 because even the slightest exposure was' an injury to propriety and refinement (yu shang ta )'a3)'.c Nevertheless there ,vere always a few books on acupuncture during these times, for example the Ming Thang Ta Tao Lu4 (Broad Outline of the Microcosm) by Hui Tung,S with which we may close our bibliography.
