Yi-Li Wu, Author at Asian Medicine Zone

This is a syndicated post that first appeared at http://recipes.hypotheses.org/9936

By Yi-Li Wu

It’s hard to set a compound fracture when the patient is in so much pain that he won’t let you touch him. For such situations, the Chinese doctor Wei Yilin (1277-1347) recommended giving the patient a dose of “numbing medicine” (ma yao). This would make him “fall into a stupor,” after which the doctor could carry out the needed surgical procedures: “using a knife to cut open [flesh], or using scissors to cut away the sharp ends of bone.” Numbing medicine was also useful when extracting arrowheads from bones, Wei said, enabling the practitioner to “use iron tongs to pull it out, or use an auger to bore open [the bone] and thus extract it.” More generally, Wei recommended using numbing medicines for all fractures and dislocation, for it would allow the doctor to manipulate the patient’s body at will.

Wei’s preferred numbing medicine was “Wild Aconite Powder” (cao wu san), and he detailed the recipe in his influential compendium, Efficacious Formulas of a Hereditary Medical Family (Shiyi dexiao fang), completed in 1337 and printed by the Imperial Medical Academy of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). In his preface, Wei affirmed that medical formulas were the foundation of medicine and that a doctor’s ability to cure depended on his ability to use these tools skillfully. Wei’s family had practiced medicine for five generations, and he synthesized their knowledge with that of other doctors to produce a comprehensive treatise encompassing internal medicine; the diseases of women and children; eye diseases; illnesses of the mouth, teeth, and throat; ulcers and swellings; and diseases caused by invasions of “wind” (ailments with sudden onset, including febrile epidemics and paralytic strokes). Numbing medicine appeared in Wei’s chapters on bone setting and weapon wounds.

Wei’s Wild Aconite Powder is the earliest datable recipe that I have found for surgical anesthesia in a Chinese text, and it is a valuable window onto practices that were largely transmitted orally, whether in medical families or from master to disciple. Dynastic histories relate that the legendary doctor Hua Tuo (110-207) employed a formula called mafeisan to render his patients insensible prior to cutting them, even opening up their abdomens to excise rotting flesh and noxious accumulations. Some scholars have hypothesized that mafeisan (literally “hemp-boil-powder) may have contained morphine or cannabis (ma), but its ingredients remain a mystery. A text attributed to the twelfth-century physician Dou Cai (ca. 1146) recommended using a mixture of powdered cannabis and datura flowers (shan qie zi, also called man tuo luo hua) to put patients to sleep prior to moxibustion treatments, which in this text could involve a hundred or more cones of burning mugwort placed directly on the patient’s skin. Wei Yilin’s recipe provides important additional textual evidence for a tradition of anesthetic formulas based on toxic plants, one that was clearly in circulation long before he wrote it down.

At least as far back as the Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica(3^rd c.), medical authors had described aconite as highly toxic (for contemporary Roman views of aconite, see blogpost by Molly Jones-Lewis). In the right hands, however, aconite was a powerful drug, and part of the Chinese practice of using poisons to cure (see blogpost by Yan Liu). Warm and acrid, aconite could drive out pathogenic wind and cold from the body, break up stagnant accumulations, and invigorate the body’s vitalities. In the language of Chinese yin-yang cosmology, it nourished yang—all that was active, heating, external, and ascending. The main aconite root was considered more toxic than the subsidiary roots (designated by the separate name fu zi, “appended offspring”), and the wild form was more potent than the cultivated variety.

Images of toxic medicinal plants from China’s most celebrated pharmacological work, Li Shizhen (1518-93), Compendium of Materia Medica (author’s preface dated 1590). Woodblock edition of 1603. Wild aconite is the middle image in the top row. Cultivated aconite (main and subsidiary roots) are in the bottom right corner. Image credit: National Library of China. Posted on-line at the World Digital Library.

Wei’s numbing recipe consisted of 13 plant ingredients, including the main roots of both wild and cultivated (Sichuanese) aconite, along with drugs known as good for treating wounds:

Young fruit of the honey locust (zhu yao zao jiao)
Momordica seeds (mu bie zi)
Tripterygium (zi jin pi)
Dahurian angelica (bai zhi)
Pinellia (ban xia)
Lindera (wu yao)
Sichuanese lovage (chuan xiong)
Aralia (tu dang gui)
Sichuanese aconite (chuan wu)
Five taels each[1]

Star anise (bo shang hui xiang)
“Sit-grasp” plant (zuo ru), simmered in wine until hot
Wild aconite (cao wu)
Two taels each

Costus (mu xiang), three mace

Combine the above ingredients. Without pre-roasting, make into a powder. In all cases of crushed or broken or dislocated bones, use two mace, mixed into high quality red liquor.

Wei most likely learned this formula from his great-uncle Zimei, a specialist in bonesetting and wounds. Its local origins are also suggested by its use of zuo ru, literally “sit-grasp”, a toxic plant whose botanical identity is unclear. However, according to the eighteenth-century Gazetteer of Jiangxi (Jiangxi tong zhi), sit-grasp was native to Jiangxi, Wei’s home province, and was used by indigenes to treat injuries from blows and falls. While classical pharmacology focused on the curative effects of aconite, Wei’s anesthetic relied on aconite’s ability to stupefy and numb, while curbing its ability to kill. If an initial dose failed to make the patient go under, Wei said, the doctor could carefully administer additional doses of wild aconite, sit-grasp herb and the datura flower.

Additional images of toxic medicinal plants from Li Shizhen, Compendium of Materia Medica. Sit-grasp herb is in the middle of the top row, and datura flower in the middle of the bottom. Image credit: National Library of China. Posted on-line at the World Digital Library.

In subsequent centuries, as medical texts proliferated, we find additional examples of numbing medicines that employed aconite, datura, and other toxic plants, employed when setting bones and draining abscesses, and to numb injured flesh before repairing tears and lacerations to ears, noses, lips, and scrotums. Such manual and surgical therapies are an integral part of the history of healing in China.

Yi-Li Wu is a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (US) and an affiliated researcher of EASTmedicine, University of Westminster, London (UK). She earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University and was previously a history professor at Albion College (USA) for 13 years. Her publications include Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2010) and articles on medical illustration, forensic medicine, and Chinese views of Western anatomical science. She is currently completing a book on the history of wound medicine in China.

Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Award “Beyond Tradition: Ways of Knowing and Styles of Practice in East Asian Medicines, 1000 to the present” (097918/Z/11/Z). I am also grateful to Lorraine Wilcox for directing me to the work of Dou Cai.

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[1] The weight of the tael (Ch. liang) has varied over time, but during Wei’s lifetime would have been equivalent to 40 grams. A mace (Ch. qian) is one-tenth of a tael.

The following is a syndicated post that first appeared at http://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2015/12/03/wrapped-in-flesh-views-of-the-body-in-east-asian-medicine/ See the original post for the images from the NLM collection that accompany the article.

How do you assess the state of a broken bone when you can’t directly see it? Writing in 1808, Chinese doctor Qian Xiuchang discussed a problem shared by healers world-wide prior to the X-ray age: “When someone has a dislocated or fractured bone, the bone and joint are wrapped in flesh. Looking at it from the exterior, it is hard to get a clear understanding, and there is the danger of making an error.” To improve the state of bonesetting knowledge, Qian compiled Supplemented Essentials on Medicine for Injuries (Shangke buyao). That book can be found in the collection of the National Library of Medicine and is now accessible online.

An innovative feature of Qian’s text is that it includes two drawings of the human skeleton, shown from the front and the back. Chinese medical texts had long included written descriptions of the body’s “bones” (gu), a term that included individual bones as well as palpable bony landmarks. These were particularly important in acupuncture, where practitioners used them as reference points to locate the spots where needles could be inserted. Some acupuncture diagrams also outlined the positions of major bones. However, prior to the nineteenth century, Chinese texts on therapeutic medicine did not contain diagrams of the full skeleton. In 1742, when the Imperial Medical Academy compiled a textbook on bonesetting, the illustrations only indicated the position of bones by labels on the outside of human figures. In 1770, however, the Qing imperial government promulgated a set of official inquest forms in order to standardize forensic investigations on skeletal remains. It was these forensic diagrams of the skeleton that Qian Xiuchang borrowed and reproduced in his work on treating injuries, so that readers could more easily learn the forms of bones hidden beneath the skin.

Qian Xiuchang, a native of Shanghai, had received some degree of classical education and he had presumably once aspired to success in the civil service examinations that defined members of the Chinese socio-political elite. He became interested in injury medicine after he broke his leg. He apprenticed with the doctor who cured him and eventually became successful enough to attract disciples of his own. Seven of them helped to collate his Supplemented Essentials, which discussed a wide range of traumatic injuries caused by weapons, blows, and falls. It also featured a laudatory preface from Su Chang’a, a former Shanghai magistrate who became a supporter after Qian saved the life of a prisoner who had attempted suicide.

It was an era when the Chinese were critically re-evaluating received teachings, including those on medicine. At the time that Qian’s text was printed, another doctor, Hu Tingguang, was completing his own manuscript on injury medicine and also incorporated forensic diagrams of the skeleton. Both books sought to address the shortcomings of the imperial bonesetting manual. Besides using forensic medicine—and diagrams of the human skeleton—to improve their readers’ knowledge of the bones, they also incorporated forensic teachings on “mortal points,” namely spots on the body where injuries were particularly dangerous.

Qian’s Supplemented Essentials thus leads us to consider an understudied aspect of East Asian medical history: how doctors investigated and understood the body’s material structures and components. The present-day view is that “traditional Chinese medicine” is primarily interested in the body’s energies and vital functions and not in anatomy or body structures. Historically, however, that was not precisely the case. East Asian healers argued about how to define the parts of the body and their relation to health, injury, and disease, and like Qian Xiuchang, pursued different methods for improving their knowledge of the body: textual study and introspection, the dissection and observation of corpses, careful observation of healthy and diseased people.

These issues took center stage at an extraordinary workshop. Held October 2-4, 2015 at the University of Michigan, Comparative perspectives on body materiality and structure in the history of Sinitic and East Asian medicinesbrought together an international group of scholars (including historian Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine) to discuss medical portrayals and practices of the body, from the first century A.D. to the nineteenth, in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Mongol Empire, and Tibet.

The workshop explored a number of questions. How did different representations of the body co-exist with each other within a given cultural context? The anatomical images and descriptions in Tibetan medical treatises, for example, included those based on examination of corpses as well as those elaborating humoral and vitalistic beliefs and those metaphorically comparing the body’s components to a palace or to a kingdom’s rulers and ministers . Different body views were linked to different explanations for how and why illness afflicted the body, and to different therapeutic methods.

Competing images of the internal organs circulated in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and were the subject of debates about how internal structures were connected to each other and to imagined centers of primordial vitality.

The conference also explored the status and value assigned to medical illustration compared to textual descriptions of the body, and how visual conventions from various realms of medicine influenced each other. In early nineteenth-century Japan, for example, both the bonesetting expert Kako Ryōgen (1810) and the surgeon Hanaoka Seishū (1760–1835) employed images in which the body’s flesh was transparent or invisible. Finally, the conference highlighted the historical importance of surgery, bone setting, and other manual therapies that required healers to physically manipulate the body’s components.

The rich diversity of presentations, the wealth of ideas and material, and the lively discussions that ensued, showed the creative vigor of contemporary scholarship on East Asian medicine, enormously facilitated by the increasing number of rare books and manuscripts that have been digitized by the National Library of Medicine and other libraries and made accessible online for researchers throughout the world.

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