Practical or Cultural: American Medical Perceptions of Acupuncture from the Boom of the 1820s to ‘Acupuncture Fever’ of the 1970s

Abstract

In the United States today, acupuncture and Chinese medicine are so connected that the terms are almost interchangeable. Yet, when acupuncture first came to prominence in the American medical community in the 1820s, it was seen as a European innovation and associated with physicians in Paris and London. In contrast to the cultural models of therapeutic action so prevalent today, medical manuals and textbooks of the nineteenth century tended to classify acupuncture as a form of “practical medicine,” an empirically effective technique without a definitive theoretical basis. This paper traces a genealogy of the different ways in which acupuncture has historically been recognized in the United States. Particular attention is paid to the period of “acupuncture fever” in the 1970s, the appearance of acupuncture in American medical texts in the late nineteenth century, and the initial wave of discourse around acupuncture in the 1820s. This paper demonstrates an ongoing historical tension between framing acupuncture in terms of a complex system of cultural concepts and framing it as a simple and practical therapy whose efficacy is most clearly felt in the space of the clinical encounter.