The role of acu-moxa textbooks in teaching and learning Chinese Medicine in contemporary China: a historical analysis based on literature research and interviews with textbook compilers and users
By Cinzia Scorzon - MSc in Acupuncture
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role of standardized textbooks in teaching and learning Chinese Medicine (CM), specifically acu-moxa, in contemporary China. Such textbooks have been instrumental in allowing Westerners to develop and vision of CM as a coherent system of ideas and concepts, a theory that must be learned and understood before it can be applied in clinical practise.
A range of multi-disciplinary studies that have been published over recent decades challenges this view, which can be shown to have close affinities to Western models of scientific knowledge and medicine. These demonstrate that CM is not a medical system in the above sense but rather a collection of doctrines, principles and practises that can be combined in a multitude of ways and that theory and practise are tightly bound to each other.
My study employs three difference modes of analysis to shed light on the tension between these two different views. By means of historical analysis I first establish that CM textbooks are the products of a particular historical period and they were constructed to enable teaching of CM in educational institutions moulded on Western models of knowledge.
Secondly, I use interviews with educators and physicians of CM who contributed to the writing of these textbooks, who employed them in their lectures and who learned CM from them, to understand how textbooks function in the process of becoming a physician. Finally, I examine continuity and change in these textbooks. Here I find that although the content of textbooks has not changed very much, their understanding by physicians has. I conclude that we need to understand that learning CM is not a neutral process but that is constructions specific version of CM. Hence, how we learn CM does affect how we practise but, inversely, how we want to practise will need to shape how we wish to study it.
