Prof. Volker Scheid PhD, FRCHM, FBAcC is an internationally known practitioner, teacher, and scholar of Chinese medicine. He was Director of EASTmedicine at the University of Westminster, a trans-disciplinary research centre for the study of East Asian medicines, from 2004 to 2018, and is now a Visiting Researcher at the China Centre, University of Kiel. His latest book, Searching for the Dao of Medicine: Landscapes of Thoughtful Practice in Late Imperial Study (Berghahn 2026), explores different pathways to clinical virtuosity proposed by physicians and medical writers in China between the fourteenth century and the present.

Combating Epidemics: A Historical Perspective

Yan Liu (University of Buffalo, SUNY)

Abstract: This talk examines a wide array of strategies developed by medical figures, religious practitioners, and political actors in fighting epidemics throughout Chinese history, and reflects upon how these varieties of measures could inform our contemporary thinking and handling of contagious diseases.

Bio: Yan Liu is an assistant professor in History at SUNY, Buffalo. He specializes in the cultural history of medicine in premodern China (the first millennium CE), with particular interests in the material culture of medicine, the history of the body and the senses, religious healing, and the global circulation of medical knowledge. His first book (open-access), Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China, will be published by the University of Washington Press in June 2021.

Bypassing the Technocratic State in South Korea: Doctors Mobilizing Korean Medicine in the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020

James Flowers (Kyung Hee University)

Abstract: The global media and politicians alike applaud the successful implementation of policies to crush the spread of the virus in South Korea, but do not acknowledge that traditional medicine doctors prescribing herbal medicines played an important role in that success.

Bio: James Flowers is a “Brain Pool Program” Research Fellow at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. He is an historian of medicine in East Asia focusing on Korea, and a Chinese medicine practitioner. He has a PhD in History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

From the Gold Rush to COVID-19: Chinese Medicine as Healthcare for Diverse American Communities

Dr. Joshua Park (DSOM, AP)

Abstract: This talk explores the role of Chinese Medicine in epidemics through an examination of its history in the United States, with an emphasis on its role in promoting the health of communities of color.

Bio: Dr. Joshua Park (DSOM, AP) is a licensed Acupuncture Physician and board certified Chinese Herbalist. He graduated from the National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, OR, as one of the first in North America to receive a clinical doctorate in the field of Chinese Medicine. Dr. Park works in hospital settings across South Florida to provide integrative medical care for a variety of complex conditions.

Host: Michael Stanley-Baker NTU, Singapore
Welcome: Angelika C. Messner IASTAM-president

Robust responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have not only come from biomedical healthcare workers. Researchers and clinicians in the world’s traditional healthcare systems have also mounted large-scale and localised efforts. Despite the racialized and politicised representations of these efforts in Anglophone media, serious professionals have been performing ongoing research, protocols, and clinical treatments, and have met with clinical successes. This webinar will present ongoing and recently published clinical trials of COVID-19 treatments with traditional medicine in China and in Tibetan communities in the US.

Speakers and Abstracts

Rhetoric and Reality: The Role of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the COVID-19 Treatment and Prevention Effort in China

Shelley Ochs, Ph.D., Licensed Doctor of Chinese Medicine, Beijing United Family Hospital, Beijing Center for China Studies

Thomas Avery Garran, PhD., China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences: National Center for Materia Medica Resources and Daodi Herbs

During the COVID-19 epidemic, Chinese medicine physician-researchers from state institutions were summoned by the National Health Commission to organize teams to serve on the frontlines in Wuhan. With almost 5,000 Chinese medicine personnel, Chinese herbal Medicine was a significant component of the national effort to prevent and treat this disease. However, the demarcations between prevention and treatment, between individual and population-level treatment protocols, and even between biomedicine and Chinese medicine, were often blurred in the mist of the urgent imperative to provide whatever measures might be effective for treating this previously-unknown disease. Consequently, relatively minimal rigorous “scientific evidence” has been produced, though several important studies have been published. This should be understood in light of the characteristics of traditional Chinese medicine itself and in comparison to similar mobilizations during the SARS and Japanese Encephalitis epidemics. Parallels with the latter are striking. Lower rates of infection amongst medical personnel, lower mortality rates, and fewer cases of progression to severe disease can all be attributed to Chinese medicine with statistical evidence, however, more fundamental disagreements often make that contentious.

In many communities of science and scholarship, including some segments of international communities of Chinese medicine practitioners, there is an insistence upon only conceding that CM is effective when it is used “exclusively,” and, in some cases, as the only means of diagnosing patients. An examination of the actual thought and practice of traditionally-trained physicians in China working on the frontlines in the COVID-19 epidemic shows us a way through these disagreements. We see that a nuanced understanding of the role of Chinese medicine in Wuhan and the complex, bi-directional translations between biomedicine and traditional Chinese medicine that took place there contains lessons for future practice and scholarship.

From the Periphery to the Center: Tracking COVID-19 through Tibetan Medicine

Tawni Tidwell, TMD, PhD Center for Healthy Minds, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This presentation describes the management and treatment of Covid-19 on the Tibetan plateau and its presentation in North America. Though transmission barely penetrated the Tibetan plateau even weeks after the novel coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, by late February, Tibetan regions had significant transmission—with the greatest concentration in its far eastern counties. As news of containment in Wuhan spread, reports also emerged from the plateau on cases treated successfully with integrated biomedical-Tibetan medical care, making their physicians local cultural heroes. Zhong Nanshan, China’s chief coronavirus expert, announced the national Covid-19 research committee’s interest in Tibetan medicine, and also launched a small-scale clinical trial with forty-subjects using three nationally approved Tibetan formulas. Though data analysis continues, a preliminary auxiliary report recommends adjunct use of Tibetan therapies in China’s biomedical hospitals to reduce mortalities, and Tibetan medical research institutions have received national funds to initiate studies. However, due to national policy that Covid-19 patients be treated exclusively in biomedical hospitals and the limited number of traditional formulas with national permits for biomedical facility use, evaluation of Tibetan medicine as a course of treatment for Covid-19 or neutralizing the virus has been severely limited.

As the health, humanitarian and socioeconomic crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic unfolded in major city centres across the US and Canada, the fault lines of highest impact among immigrant populations and people of colour were clear. In urban metropolises with large Tibetan and Himalayan communities, many of whom serve as nurses, doctors and healthcare workers on Covid-19 wards, Tibetan medicine served as primary therapeutic care for many who were infected with the virus themselves while caring for others. Several examples from an ongoing study tracking cases treated exclusively by Tibetan medicine in the US and Canada will be presented.

From Sick Man of Asia to Sick Uncle Sam: The Case of Traditional Chinese Medicine and COVID-19

Marta Hanson Department of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University

For most of the twentieth century, the racist trope “Sick man of Asia” haunted Chinese rulers and people alike; now, the roles have completely reversed with all the healthcare problems in the US that the Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare (such as underlying structural racism contributing to much higher rates of people of colour dying from Covid-19, essential workers forced to choose livelihood over their lives, no universal health coverage to provide a safety net from financial ruin due to illness, and federal-level mismanagement and worse lies about the severity of the pandemic, etc.). “Sick Uncle Sam” is the new focus of the world’s concern over a what appears to be a declining superpower. How did this happen? Why is the new moniker “Sick Uncle Sam” a good thing? The power of the “sick man” label resides in accepting a sick role, opening dialogue on diagnoses, and choosing appropriate therapeutic strategies. The pejorative moniker “Sick Uncle Sam” could have the potential to be powerfully motivating for substantive change in the US healthcare system as was the “Sick Man of Asia” for China for “national salvation” and “saving the country by science.” But will Uncle Sam open himself up to the wider range of treatments available for controlling Covid-19 from East Asian historical experiences, healthcare models, and even traditional medicines? This talk will focus on the current debates over the use of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for integrated treatments of Covid-19 patients in mainland China and compare them with those debates over 17 years ago about using TCM for treating SARS. This comparison allows one to examine thematic continuities in medical scepticism and highlight what has changed in terms of clinical practice, Chinese government support, and media coverage o

Moderator: Dr Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Historical Contours of the Medieval Afro-Eurasian Disease Landscape: New Findings from Genetics and Medical History

Prof. Monica H. Green (Independent scholar)

Recent developments in genetics have given a new resolution to long-standing questions about the origins and dissemination histories of the world’s major infectious diseases. This brief presentation will summarize what is now known about seven diseases that originated in Afro-Eurasia: plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, and the treponemal diseases, syphilis and yaws. The increasing resolution of these disease narratives provides a basis for assessing not only when and how Asia was affected by them, but also how medical responses may have developed at both local and transcontinental levels.

Some Moments in the Encounter between Chinese Medicine and Covid-19

Prof. Volker Scheid (Practitioner and historian, London)

Before eventually some stable narrative will emerge about what Covid-19 is and does I will present some disparate moments in the encounter between Chinese medicine and this as yet only partially understood entity. My focus will be on the choices that various actors make in this encounter, ranging from the liberal press in the West to Chinese medicine practitioners and patients in China and the West. In these encounters Covid-19 is invariably constructed as a threat as well as an opportunity in struggles over ideology and status as much as health and sheer physical survival.

Sick Societies and the Flow of Life

Prof. A. David Napier (UCL Anthropology Dept., London)

In the early 1980s I conducted fieldwork on ritual healing in Indonesia. The timing coincided with the then-emerging HIV/AIDS pandemic. Though the pandemic proved devastating globally, it was often understood at local levels in ways at odds with global narratives about mortality and morbidity. In particular, indigenous views of human agency in the face of biological threat alerted me to other ways of understanding viral diseases as invasive—especially in Bali, where the presence of potentially infectious foreigners was, and yet remains, ubiquitous and unavoidable. These lessons apply equally today in the face of Covid-19.