Prof. Paul U. Unschuld gave a lecture in IHNS

Prof. Paul U. Unschuld, the famous historian of Chinese Traditional Medicine of German, gave a lecture in institute for the history of natural science, Chinese Academy of Science on 11 September, 2009.This lecture, which named “The history of the German encounter with Chinese medicine from its beginnings in the 17th century to the present”, attracted a lot of scholars and students from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences.

In the late 17th century, Andreas Cleyer, a German physician in the service of the Dutch East India Company published, in Latin language, a book on Chinese medicine. Ever since, knowledge on the Chinese tradition of interpreting and dealing with health and disease has been presented by authors with various backgrounds to the German public. Stimulated by French colleagues, a “German Physicians’ Association for Acupuncture” was founded in the early 1950s. However, it was only in the 1970s, following the “opening of China”, that the German public became familiarized with so-called TCM and acupuncture on a grand scale. In the meantime, countless German and Chinese practitioners with varying backgrounds of training an expertise have set up privately owned clinics and work in hospitals all over the country. Attempts at explaining the effects of acupuncture by modern scientific methods have been undertaken by some research institutes. Still, TCM and acupuncture have remained marginal in the German health care delivery system, and will, most likely, not be able to have a stronger impact despite strong lobbying efforts supported by the Chinese government. This lecture traced the historical phases of the German encounter with Chinese medicine, and it offered some interpretations of, first, why TCM and acupuncture have been welcomed in recent decades by some parts of the German public, and, second, why TCM and acupuncture will remain of little influence on general health care in future.