Acupuncture History

Acupuncture is a branch of traditional Chinese medicine, based on the location and manipulation of fine needles into various points of the body for therapeutic purposes.

Acupuncture is a traditional art therapy which is developing its diagnostic reasoning and therapeutic energy Taoist vision of man and the universe: the human microcosm is subject to the same rules, which will inspire lifestyle, and will frame the development of the medical procedure.  The effectiveness of acupuncture is not a scientifically proven fact.

The common Chinese term zhenjiu refers to both acupuncture and moxibustion.  The Latin term “acupunctura” was coined in the seventeenth century in Holland by a doctor who stayed in Japan, called Willem ten Rhyne, from the Latin acus, “needle”.  From this Latin term derives the French and English words “acupuncture” or the German term “Akupunktur”.

History
Ancient non-Chinese
In India, the use of acupuncture is mentioned there are about 5,000 years ago in Ayurveda (Ayurvedic medicine Treaty) and is used today in traditional Indian medicine.

More than a thousand years before China, one found in ancient Egypt a description of ducts running through the body carrying various fluids (blood, water, air, mucus etc).

The balance between these fluids could be the cause of disease. Around 1534 BC, the Ebers Papyrus (Eber 854A), in the British Museum, gives a representation of channels (called metu) which circulate in various fluids.  “There are four vessels in the nostrils, both give mucus, both give blood. There are four vessels to the liver; it is they who create the mood and air, which then causes all diseases arisen by the overload of blood.”

First traces of Chinese acupuncture

The Chinese are accustomed to consider the value of a cultural practice judged by its length.  Placing themselves under the authority of an old master, he was legendary, with a tradition of more than 5000 years, is the guarantee of seriousness and respectability of the process. ”Without trampling traces, we can not reach into the room” said the Master (Entretiens XI, 19).

The Chinese thinker so openly claimed guardianship and flees anything that might resemble the autonomy of dear thought to European philosophers.  The discovery in 1973 of 14 medical records in a newly excavated tomb in Mawangdui in Hunan has fully reviewed the history of Chinese medicine.  Currently these texts establish the following chronology:

In 168 BC, when closing the Mawangdui grave, no acupuncture technique was known. The texts of these tombs show clearly that the typical features of the therapeutic Chinese were not yet established in the Qin (-221, -206) and early Han.

The first reference to acupuncture is clearly dated in the “historical memory” (the Shiji) by Sima Qian (-145, -87) compiled in 90 BC.  In this book, the author described a doctor named Chunyu Yi (-216, -150) accused of malpractice for treatment of implanted needles on patients. In two trials, and in 167 – 154, the physician is obliged to demonstrate the therapeutic benefit of acupuncture at a time when this technology was just beginning to spread.  It could therefore date the birth of acupuncture to the middle of the second century BC.  It will prevail then gradually as the dominant therapeutic medicine of systematic correspondence.

The Huangdi Nei Jing, the reference book on acupuncture, massage, gymnastics and therapeutic drugs is in part post. The texts are heterogeneous, some parts may date from the late Warring States period (-500 to -220) and other first century BCE.

Anyway, it is no copy of the Han period and all options that have survived have undergone numerous revisions over the centuries. The Nanjing, “the Classic of Difficulties” unifies disparate viewpoints and is sometimes incoherent of Huangdi Neijing.  The work, composed between I and III century, methodically exposes the conceptual system of systematic correspondences underpinning two millennia of traditional Chinese medicine.