Anatomical Roots of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine

Abstract

The earliest historic reference to a dissection of a human cadaver is found in the biography of Emperor Wang Mang 王莾who in 16 C.E. ordered the medical dismembering of the body of a rebel named Wang Sun-Ching (occidental anatomy began only 1,500 years later). Measurements were made of his internal organs, and bamboo rods were inserted into his blood vessels in order to discover where they begin and where they end for the purpose of a better understanding of how to cure diseases. Similar anatomical dissections are mentioned in chapter 12 of the Huang-Di Nei-Jing Ling-Shu 黃帝內經靈樞, entitled Jing-Shui 經水 The ancient Chinese characters for body dissections given here are the same as in modern Chinese anatomy, namely Jie-Pou 解剖. The courses of the pathways as laid out in chapter 10 of the Ling-Shu Jing could well be the result of such dissections; they are elementary for acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Otherwise it cannot be explained why ancient Chinese physicians were able to denominate the respective viscera properly with names still in use today and how they could locate them topographically in their correct position as well as linking them to the vessel pathways leading to the periphery of the human body. The majority of Western acupuncturists adhere to far-fetched assumptions about ‘meridians', ‘channels', ‘points', and ‘energy' which have never existed in China. Western acupuncture thus relies on a basic logical error, a so-called Wrong Beginning (Proton pseudos πρῶτον ψεῶδος). That is why modern acupuncture finally needs an anatomical nomenclature for daily practice and scientific research including all the structures involved, which are still the same as 2,000 years ago.