Medical missionaries to China and the reformation of anatomy
One page on PainSci cites Fu 2014: ‘Reductionism’ Is Not an Insult
PainSci commentary on Fu 2014: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
According to some, cultural and religious (Confucian) taboos made anatomical and physiological reduction difficult by making autopsy taboo. I’ve seen the no-dissection-in-China claim made in many contexts, but disputed in others, and I have no way of readily resolving it. However, this paper makes it fairly clear that dissection probably was mostly avoided in China for centuries, whether it was impeded by a taboo or something else.
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
The earliest record of human anatomy in chapters of the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic is likely to be based upon proper dissections. The first incident of human dissection for medical purpose documented in the History of Han Dynasty occurred in AD 13. During the Sung dynasty, a physician prepared illustrations of internal organs of executed criminals, published in 1113 as the Images of Truth. Successive Chinese medical treatises have plagiarized but preserved the anatomical diagrams without improvements or modifications. China had to wait till the mid-19th century for Anglo-American Protestant medical missionaries to bring about a complete and permanent reformation of anatomical science.
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.
- Recovery trajectories in common musculoskeletal complaints by diagnosis contra prognostic phenotypes. Aasdahl 2021 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.