CHAPTER ONE Introduction
1.1 Introduction of Joseph Needham
Since leaders of May Fourth and New Cultural Movements put forward a question,why China has no science, Chinese intellectuals, not without shame, plunged intoself-reflection on an array of defects of their own culture. This national nihilismpervaded China until the middle of 20thcentury when a British scientist excavated abunch of convincing antique evidence to prove for the first time the shinningcivilization created by ancient China. This scientist transforms the way China wasunderstood by the Western world and helps Chinese scholars straighten up. His nameis Joseph Needham.Joseph Needham was neither sinologist nor historian when he first embarked onhis lifetime’s work of Chinese science. Before 1937, he was being engaged inresearch at the Biochemical Institute at Cambridge University, busy writing TheSceptical Biologist (1929), The Great Amphibium (1932) and History of Embryology(1934) which established his great fame as a biologist and embryologist. In 1937, LuGwei-djen, a charming young Chinese scientist arrived at Cambridge to study forPh.D on chemistry and she knocked on Needham’s door. Her visit completelyredirected Needham’s research interest to the beauty of Chinese language and later onChinese ancient culture and of course ignited love lasting for more than fifty years.
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1.2 Contribution of Science and Civilization in China
SCC’s encyclopedia size is far out of Needham’s initial expectation. It ranges fromphysics, mathematics, mechanical engineering to botany, military technology andmedicine. With the assistance of Wang Ling, Lu Gwei-djen and other sinologists,Needham ransacks the primary material previously unknown to Occidental scholars,and often to Oriental ones also, assembles them with outstanding synthesis skill andinterprets them under one critical evaluation. Needless to say, its systematicdemonstration of and respect for Chinese ancient civilization have beckoned patrioticconfidence back among young Chinese after missionaries of the Society of Jesus withtheir colonial contempt dismissed China as one of the barbarian countries. That waswhat Chen Lifu most concerned when he launched the massive translation of SCC inTaiwan in 1969. He hoped that SCC could to some extent contribute in the culturalrenaissance in China. It definitely did.Ma Poying, fellow of Royal Academy of Medicine of UK and one of the chiefeditors of SCC, highlights a couple of contributions SCC has made: correcting theprejudice that China has developed no science or technology; filling the blanks ofinternational history of science with China claiming more than one hundredinventions; initiating and practising a new methodology in comparing contemporarycultures, and so on.
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CHAPTER TWO Methodology of Sociology of Scientific Knowledge
2.1 Sociology of Scientific Knowledge in Conflict with Needham’s Concept
Sociology of Scientific Knowledge is a study of science as a social activity, whichemerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For the first time, the form and content ofscientific knowledge fall into the main concern rather than its organization ordistribution. It demolishes the previous tight bunker modern science builds arounditself under the name of ultimate objectivity, and gets down to investigate a variety ofpolitical, historical, cultural or economic factors involved in the scientific knowledgeitself. This notion is in direct contradiction with that of Needham, a disciple ofmodern science. And this contradiction serves as the right key to unravel Needham’smisunderstandings toward Chinese medical culture and philosophy. In the followingsections, Needham’s belief on the authority of modern science is traced back to theinfluence of Marx and Weber and his thoughts are rebutted in the light of SSK.
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2.2 Needham’s Perspectives on Oriental Study
When Chen Pang-hsien published the first modern-style History of Chinese Medicinein 1937, he intended to record faithfully the facts in the ancient and modern history ofmedicine and give a push to the undergoing transition to the scientific and laboratorymedicine. However, he did not ambition to explain the transition. The evidentialresearch tradition inherited kept him indulged in juxtaposing summaries of primarysources instead of unraveling their social causes. Chen’s followers seemed to take hisfootsteps with more and more textual discoveries and artifacts thickening the tomeswritten by the last generation. Joseph Needham is different. Right at the beginning of his research, he wascurious and ambitious. He put forward several questions “Why modern science hadnot developed in Chinese civilization?...Why did modern science, themathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advancedtechnology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo?” (Grand,190). This famous Needham’s Puzzle determines his way of bringing modernhumanities to the study of science. According to Needham, to explain the failure ofChinese society to develop modern science had better start with explaining the failureof Chinese society to develop mercantile and industrial capitalism and then industrialrevolution.
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CHAPTER THREE NEEDHAM’S STRUCTURAL PREFERENCE .........21
3.1 Selection of Mainline to Illustrate Chinese Medical History .... 21
3.2 Overlooked Herbal Medicine ..........25
3.3 Over-emphasized Alchemic Culture ....... 27
3.4 Parrying Magico-religious Culture .......29
CHAPTER FOUR NEEDHAM’S CULTURAL FALLACIES .......33
4.1 Wu Xing versus Six Diseases .......33
4.2 “Vagueness” of Zheng versus “Objectivity” of Disease ....35
4.3 Social Construction of Chinese Medicine’s Inferiority. .........38
CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION ..........43
CHAPTER FOUR Needham’s Cultural Fallacies
4.1 Wu Xing versus Six Diseases
Yin Yang and Wu Xing are two most fundamental pillars to brace the building ofChinese medicine. Wu Xing was translated as five elements first by missionaries backin the 16th century, and this translation has been widely quoted since then. TheChinese xing is primarily concerned with changing states of being, but earlymissionaries, with their pride as colonizers, were fully convinced that the Chinesemust think in identical categories as the Aristotelean Christians, thus translating it byfive elements, by analogy with the Western system of the four elements. Until recently,this term is corrected as five phases or processes, or five evolutive phases by ManfredPorkert, to render its original meaning.Needham, for sure, discerned no difference between these names, as he used fivephases twice and five elements for the rest. He contends that five elements are parallelwith the four elements of Aristotle, except one point: the former comprises not onlyfire, water and earth but also wood and metal. Neither can these ancient concepts,prevailing as they were a thousand years ago, be put into modern scientific terms at all.Because, in his words, “they are neither verifiable nor falsifiable.” He even feels sorryfor Chinese physicians, “whose clinical insights were truly profound”, yet “used theseconcepts as trellis-work on which to hang their understanding of diseases” (Vol.6,65-66)..
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Conclusion
Needham’s volume of Chinese Medicine is based on a thorough acquaintancewith the archaeological evidence and the overwhelming mass of primary sources.Representing the outstanding scholarship in the research on Chinese medicine, it hassoothed the wounds of some Chinese who lament the ravage of traditional Chinesemedicine.Through a careful textual reading, I discover that Needham’s conviction on theyardstick of Western medicine has much to do with his arrangement of the generalstructure as well as subdivision. Hygiene, immunology, qualifying examinations,immunology and forensic medicine constitute the mainline to illustrate history ofChinese medicine, which may not be common. Needham selects these five becausethey have counterparts in the Western medical history, and moreover, traditionalChinese medicine has already retreated from at least three of the four fields, namelyhygiene, immunology and forensic medicine. On the contrast, the classical focusessuch as clinical achievements, prescriptions and theoretic development are dismissedby Needham, due to their incompatibility with modern science.
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Reference (omitted)