Traditional Chinese medicine and “Western” medicine are the products of two great civilizations in the history of mankind, and they contribute to the health of a huge proportion of the world population. Western medicine is seen widely as the orthodox modern medicine, while Chinese medicine is often regarded as an alternate and parallel system of medicine. To more fully comprehend their uneasy and sometimes contradictory and competitive relationship, it is worthwhile to examine their historical development within their respective civilizations. However, most treatise on the medical history of the East and the West examine them longitudinally, chronologically from the pre-historic to the present, for the West, and then separately, for the East. In this lecture, the speaker proposes to briefly review them horizontally, comparing their progress at various time points in history. The amazing finding of such an exercise was that, although these two civilizations were virtually isolated from each other until the famed visit of Marco Polo to the imperial court of China in the 13th century, there were nearly concordant advances in their respective landmarks of medical history.

             Around two millennium BC, Egyptian papyrus revealed ancient medical practices in the West including the use of herbs such as the willow bark containing aspirin, while in the East the classic Yellow Emperor's Pharmacopeia appeared, reflecting knowledge available in that era . Striking similarities in the philosophical concept of elements and their relationships which constitute the universe and affect human health can be noted between the ancient East and West; and the anatomical depiction of the heart and circulation appeared almost like a variation of the same sketch. Considering how two isolated worlds existed without communication between them in ancient times, one wonders whether these similarities reflected some sort of common genetic expressions of homo sapiens in their civilizations.

         Two historic figures, Confucius (551-479 BC) in China and Hippocrates (460-367 BC) in Greece , lived almost at the same historic time, since Hippocrates was born within two decades of the death of Confucius. More amazing was the contemporary appearance of two great physicians, Hua Tuo (110-207AD) and Galen (130-218 AD). Hua Tuo, a legendary Chinese surgeon who reportedly used anesthesia (Ma Fei San) for surgery centuries before such achievement in the West, could have met Galen in Rome for a medical conference, if they could have traveled by air ! Galen of course was a titan in Western medicine, whose idea influenced European medicine for more than a millennium. Imagine while Hua Tuo was draining an abscess for an army general, Galen was amputating the mauled leg of a gladiator in a Roman theatre !

According to Professor Joseph Needham of Oxford , by the time William Harvey explained our modern concept of blood circulation in “De Motu Cordis” (1628), Chinese physicians were already able to make differential diagnosis between typhoid fever and typhus fever, and extracted steroids from urines. Then an epochal event happened which propelled the Western medicine to a new height, while the Eastern medicine stagnated and even atrophied. The great event was the renaissance.

            How and why at this point Western medicine took off in a  trajectory toward becoming a scientific and global medicine, while that of the East remained an empirical medicine will be speculated and discussed. The speaker will use his own experience to illustrate how surgery, a branch of western medicine which is his specialty, advanced in such a scientific milieu. The importance of seeing Chinese traditional medicine as a great empirical medicine which represents pre-scientific era, rather than as a parallel alternate medical paradigm to scientific medicine, will be stressed.