Historical Studies (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2017

 

The Debate on “Making National Medicine Scientific” in the Republican Period

(Abstract)

 

Li Bingkui

 

In the 1930s, Chinese medical circles were hotly debating whether to adopt or to abandon traditional Chinese medicine (national medicine). But the opposing camps of pro-Chinese and pro-Western medicine both chorused their support for the “making national medicine scientific” (guoyi kexuehua) initiative, and discussed the possibilities and prospect of its development. The initiative aimed at resolving the dilemma of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) with scientific “techniques,” with the profound potential to “lead the world’s medical science on to a new path.” The question of whether Chinese and Western medicine reached the same goal by different means or had nothing in common not only involved the survival and profession of TCM practitioners but was also closely related to the entire medical community’s concern for the future of Chinese culture. Because of the drawbacks of “using A’s rules to regulate B,” “focusing on one good point to the exclusion of all the bad ones,” etc., the cause of “making national medicine scientific” was inevitably caught up in the dilemma of being neither desired nor dispensable. This debate reflects the anxieties and predicament of medical circles of the time in the face of “science” and “national medicine.”