Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace

Abstract

In Herbs and Roots, Tamara Venit Shelton provides a sophisticated account of Chinese medicine in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawing creatively from memoirs, interviews, archival documents, census information, newspaper articles, and advertisements, Venit Shelton compellingly analyzes how Chinese doctors navigated an increasingly hostile legal, medical, and political environment to promote their therapies, knowledge, and materia medica in the United States. Often assisted by patrons, politicians, and patients, Chinese herbalists tenaciously fought opposition to their presence. Many Chinese medical practitioners flourished, despite facing periodic imprisonment, fines, license revocation, and outright discrimination. Their dispensing of herbal medicine persisted until the end of World War II, when herbs from China became too difficult to obtain owing to Cold War restrictions. Chinese herbalists' experiences of challenging legal restrictions and promoting their medical therapies in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America left critical legacies for the post-1970s period. In the early 1970s, white American visitors to China experienced medical treatment, and newly interested audiences back home reinterpreted the visitors' experiences for eager clients in the United States. Together with Chinese medical doctors, they elevated acupuncture to a viable therapy across the United States while maintaining long-standing tropes of “orientalism” in promoting classical Chinese medical practices.Chapters 1 and 2 trace how Chinese herbalist immigrants expanded their medical care beyond fellow immigrants to the broader population, who were already sensitized to herbal treatment prior to the arrival of Chinese medicine. Chapter 3 shows how Chinese American herbalists challenged opposition to their practices by promising noninvasive medical treatments and minimal interaction with female patients to promote their approaches as an alternative to mainstream medicine. Chapters 4 and 5 show how Chinese American herbalists worked with sympathetic advisors, patrons, politicians, and patients to subvert legal and cultural attempts to end their practice. Chapter 6 shows that, while opponents of Chinese medicine failed to diminish the herbalists' popularity, both the generational shift among Chinese Americans toward rejecting traditional medicine in favor of biomedicine and the paucity of imported herbal supplies from China during the Cold War led to the demise of the herbalists by the late 1940s. US-China rapprochement by the early 1970s, as chapter 7 shows, led white Americans to visit China; after experiencing acupuncture treatment firsthand on their travels, proponents touted its efficacy, and demand for the treatment back home increased.A key strength of Venit Shelton's account is how she demonstrates that the post-1970s struggles for legal, cultural, and political legitimacy in the United States drew from similar struggles in earlier periods. Like their predecessors, acupuncturists had to appeal to white America in their marketing and leverage sympathetic patrons and patients to evade enormous legal and biomedical scrutiny. Moreover, her rich account of many Chinese American doctors who were central to transforming and promoting Chinese medicine—including the transcultural Fong Wan, reformist Chang Gee Wo, and transpacific Ka-Kit Hui—provides biographies so needed in the global history of medicine as well as the history of medicine in the United States.Venit Shelton's focus on the nineteenth and early and mid-twentieth centuries raises important research questions for the more recent history of Chinese medicine in the United States. In addition to Venit Shelton's excellent account of how Americans' visits to China in the early 1970s popularized acupuncture therapy, additional consideration of immigrants from Taiwan and Hong Kong could also shed light on Chinese medicine in the United States from 1950 to the late 1970s. During this period, practitioners and their clients from Taiwan and Hong Kong (who made up the bulk of “ethnic Chinese” immigrants between 1960 and 1980) engaged with Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture in alternative spaces such as Asian grocery stores, bookstores, travel agencies, and trading companies. Their experiences suggest that the configuration of Chinese medicine during the Cold War became partly refracted through diasporic experiences in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in addition to long-standing medical practices in the United States and China. Similarly, the presence of some African American activists promoting acupuncture as an alternative to discriminatory mainstream biomedical systems in post-1970s New York also complicates the narrative of Chinese medicine as an encounter only between white and Chinese Americans.In sum, Venit Shelton provides a much-needed narrative on the history of Chinese medicine in the United States. Her deft weaving of stories of expertise, serendipity, courage, self-representation, and the tumultuous migrant experience of Chinese doctors and their collaborators should be reflected in future histories of medicine in the United States. Herbs and Roots deserves to be widely read by scholars interested in the globalization of Chinese medicine, Asian American experiences, and the intersection of knowledge and practice in transcultural contexts.