To be canonic or scientific: a study of knowledge innovation of acupuncture and moxibustion in the Republican period of China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Reconstructing the body of acupuncture and moxibustion knowledge was seen as an important measure to prove the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine in the Republican period of China. Many physicians, such as Cheng Dan’an and Huang Zhuzhai in particular, made efforts to promote innovation in the field of acupuncture and moxibustion. Cheng Dan’an wrote textbooks, in which he made a reasonable choice between the traditional knowledge of acupuncture and moxibustion and modern biomedicine in accordance with the clinical efficacy, and the textbooks were widely circulated. Huang Zhuzhai in his monographs, however, persisted in the orthodoxy of the fundamental doctrines stemmed from the Inner Cannon of the Yellow Emperor (known in Chinese as Huangdi neijing), and adopted the method of textual criticism to collate and annotate various theories of acupuncture and moxibustion. Huang’s work was approved by the Institute of National Medicine as an accredited textbook nationwide, but the response was not as good as originally expected. Considering the academic perspectives per se, the two representative patterns of the knowledge transformation of acupuncture and moxibustion in the Republican period of China had distinct endings. It identified that refining the traditional knowledge of acupuncture and moxibustion based on empirical rationality was critical in the knowledge modernization of this treatment.