ABSTRACT
The field of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which caused such a stir in Western public health circles in the 1960s and 1970s and on which a few European and American anthropologists and historians have commented since then, came into existence in its modern institutional form only after the 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China. In conflating traditional medicine and national essence, practitioners of Chinese medicine joined their voices to those of nonmedical intellectuals who are now thought of as conservatives and traditionalists. A large Chinese pharmaceutical industry produces, and vigorously advertises, a vast array of "made-up Chinese medicines". People know that the herbal medicines and acupuncture therapies they administer and accept are often effective, and they have a very involved language in which to speak of, understand, and manipulate this effectiveness. The language of science, which even in Chinese incorporates a borrowed metaphysic, is inadequate to the experience of Chinese medicine and the illnesses articulated within it.
