Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.
Hello Friends,
When I began seriously studying Chinese medicine and related arts, I did not yet appreciate their power. I grew up in a culture that did not recognize many key aspects of the Chinese medical paradigm as legitimate, nor was I raised to believe that natural medicines like herbal remedies could have profound healing effects. However, as I began to witness the intense healing power of these modalities, I began to realize that I had been profoundly misled. Chinese medicine, when practiced correctly, can have a massive impact on one's health, rivaling pharmaceutical medicine on so many fronts.
Noting this, it occured to me that surely the West also had deep traditions of natural medicine at some point. A little research into the Humoral medical traditions of Europe, many of which were shared with the Islamic world, confirmed this. The more I learned, the more I realized that the culture I had grown up in had lost connection with some very, very important medical knowledge, a fact which has continued to be quite disturbing to me. With further investigation I progressively realized that the narrative of medical progress that I had grown up with—the idea that medicine was backward and dangerous for most of the last three thousand years and only recently became effective or safe—was simply false on many fronts (perhaps I will write more about this in a future newsletter).
If Europe once had deep and highly effective traditions of herbal knowledge as I now know Chinese medicine does, I wondered, then why aren't such traditions still a part of our cultural heritage? Here is a short piece I wrote a few years ago that gives part of an answer. This is an excerpt from a book I have had on the back-burner for some time about the secularization of medicine in China and the West, which perhaps I will finally publish later this year...
I hope you enjoy:
Perhaps the most dramatic and explicit historical instance of the repression of mystical and transcendental dimensions of medicine and healing was during the so-called "Enlightenment" in Europe, when the witch-hunts were underway. Concurrent with the colonization and extermination of populations in the New World and the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the witch-hunt in Europe led to the massacre of hundreds of thousands of women over less than two centuries. These women were tried, subjected to the cruelest torture, burned alive, or hanged, having been groundlessly accused of selling their bodies and souls to the devil and, by magical means, murdering scores of children, sucking their blood, making potions from their flesh, causing the death of their neighbors, destroying cattle and crops, raising storms, and various other forms of black magic. These charges, of course, lacked legitimate proof, and confessions of such crimes were obtained through torture.
These trials began in the 15th century and escalated in the mid-16th century. The imperial code enacted by the Catholic Church in 1532 established Witchcraft to be punishable by death, and protestant England passed a series of laws that gradually increased the ease with which a woman could be tried, tortured, and murdered for witchcraft. After 1550, laws and ordinances making witchcraft a capital crime and inciting citizens to denounce witches were also passed in Scotland, Switzerland, France and the Spanish Netherlands.
The witch-hunts, far from being a minor, if dismal, facet of European history, were waged with specific aims. The true target was not socially recognized crimes, but rather the expurgation of previously accepted practices. The presence of midwives amongst the accused, as well as community healers and those believed to have prevented conception through the use of herbal contraceptives or abortifacients, or by magic, gives us a clue as to the deeper implications of the witch hunts, and their implications for the development of medicine. The witch-hunts were a method of establishing control over bodies—specifically women's bodies—and most of all their reproductive capacities, in the service of the production of labor power, a prime concern of the ruling class as the capitalist logic of production-at-all-costs took hold of Europe. The witch trials worked to destroy a whole set of traditional practices and beliefs that were incompatible with the emerging work discipline, including traditional holistic conceptions of the body, as well as practices like magic, astrology, and geomancy, which rested on a conception of the body and of nature as alive and personified. As such, the witch trials can be understood as part of the historical transition to a more thoroughly mechanistic conception of embodiment and away from a more 'magical,' integrated, and holistic understanding of bodily existence.
The persecution of folk-healers at this time had the effect of banishing women from the realm of medicine, and suppressed and in some cases destroyed the deep and complex lineages of knowledge regarding herbs and healing remedies transmitted from generation to generation. The lack of coherent systems and living lineages of Western herbalism (most systems practiced today were either created in modern times, or are attempts to 'reclaim' lineages that died out) is due to this period of destruction and suppression of folk-knowledge. From this time onward in Europe, the field of professionalized medicine was increasingly hostile to the old ways, which understood the body to be imbued with soul and spirit, and favored an increasingly mechanistic approach.
It is not inconsequential that by the end of the 16th century, when witch trials were standardized as a routine aspect of legal proceedings, public intellectuals were often called upon to cooperate, including many still praised today as the fathers of modern rationalism and mechanism. Among them was English political theorist Thomas Hobbes, one of the most famous of the mechanical philosophers and an avowed materialist, who approved of the persecution of Witchcraft as a means of social control, even as he did not himself claim to believe in the practice itself. It should be remembered that this was during the "Enlightenment", the time popularly associated with the development of philosophical and scientific rationalism (often cited as the 'birth' of modern science). The father of mechanical philosophy, Descartes, apparently declared himself agnostic on the matter of the witch-hunt, but did not explicitly condemn the practice and, like other mechanical philosophers of the time, never spoke on behalf of those condemned as witches. Not all of the early architects of the mechanistic worldview would have been sympathetic to the trials, of course. For instance, Johannes Kepler's own mother was tried as a witch, and the widespread hostility to vestiges of the old worldview was certainly why Newton felt a need to hide his extensive alchemical experimentation throughout his life and to publicly deny it. It was increasingly unsafe in certain parts of Europe to be associated with such studies.
It is not a coincidence that, though prior to this time assistance with child-birth had always been the domain of women, as it is in traditional cultures throughout the world, this began to change. Both in France and in England starting from the end of the 16th century few women were allowed to practice obstetrics, and in the beginning of the 17th century the first male midwives began to appear. Within a century, obstetrics had become almost entirely under state control. This legacy continued through the history of institutionalized forms of medicine in the West, and male doctors were routinely put in the position of caring for (and, in many cases, manipulating and controlling) women's reproductive capacities and bodily health in general. Whereas birthing practices were once understood to be imbued with profound spiritual import, as the soul of a new being becomes incarnate, with the suppression of Women's role as midwives—the traditional carriers of such knowledge and expertise—led to the birthing process being increasingly understood as a purely material, mechanical process.
One cannot help but think of the parallels between this time in Europe and certain elements of the cultural revolution in China, when the focus of the party was ridding Chinese society of the 'four olds'. Just like holders of herbal knowledge in Europe, renowned doctors of Chinese medicine were branded forces of evil and attacked as demons and goblins. They too were subjected to public abuse, physically attacked, and many were killed. The transition to a thoroughly mechanistic view of the body came, in both cases, as part of larger, and much more disturbing, social trends.
For a fascinating account of the period of the witch trials, its connection with the changing economic system of Europe, and the related rise of mechanistic renderings of the body, see the excellent book:
Silvia Beatriz Federici, Caliban and the Witch (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 2014)
Note: As always, if you’d like to book an online appointment with me, click here or respond to this email and I will be more than happy to connect.
Aidan Keeva, DACM, L. Ac.,
Doctor of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine