2 Lacking any family background in medicine, he devoted the first half of his life to preparing for the civil service examination. The medical concept of qihua was created by Tang Zonghai 唐宗海 (1851–1908), the widely acclaimed founder of the School of Converging Chinese and Western Medicine ( Zhongxiyi huitong xuepai 中西醫匯通學派). 1 As Huang designed the term qigong to associate this set of physical exercises with the four-thousand-year ‘tradition’ of Chinese medicine, he likely did not realise that the phrase qihua as a way of characterising Chinese medicine had been a recent invention from the late nineteenth century. Inspired by this concept, for instance, Huang Yueting 黃月庭 coined the term qigong 氣功 in 1949 when he was looking for a new name for a set of bodily training exercises that he had developed with some colleagues in the ‘Liberated Zone’ of Southern Hebei. To this day, advocates and practitioners characterise Chinese medicine as being founded on the theory of qihua 氣化, that is, qi-transformation.
With the help of this new understanding of qi as steam, Tang systematically responded to the criticisms raised by Benjamin Hobson and Wang Qingren, formally starting the difficult and problematic process of (re)-visualising the Chinese medical body.Īrguably the most fundamental concept in traditional Chinese medicine, qi is a term that is impossible to translate into English but that has entered common English usage. Instead of creating an invisible and immaterial world of qi-transformation in opposition to the materialism of Western anatomy, Tang made his conception of qi-transformation instrumental for the incorporation of Western anatomy into Chinese medical doctrines. And third, in the dual process of developing the new understanding of qi-transformation and incorporating Western anatomy into Chinese medical doctrines, Tang radically re-conceptualised and re-visualised the body of Chinese medicine, especially the three interrelated organs of the bladder, the Triple Burner, and the kidney. Second, this new understanding of qi enabled him to reform Chinese medicine by incorporating the new knowledge and visual illustrations of Western anatomy, most notably the illustration of the peritoneum from Gray’s Anatomy and the existence of the ureters.
First, Tang Zonghai drew on the newly invented model of the steam engine and the related concept of steam to create a new understanding of qi-transformation in the human body. Tang Zonghai (1851–1908), the widely acclaimed proponent of medical eclecticism in the late Qing period, invented the famous formula: ‘Western medicine is good at anatomy Chinese medicine is good at qi-transformation.’ While it is well-known that Tang coined the concept of qihua 氣化 ( qi-transformation) and thereby created a long-lasting dichotomy between Chinese and Western medicine, it is little known that Tang’s conception of qi-transformation was built upon, and therefore heavily influenced by, a newly-imported technology from the West, namely the steam engine.īased on this surprising discovery, this article intends to make three interrelated arguments.