Translations From the Chinese Medical Classics

In Britain serious study of traditional acupuncture did not develop until the 1950s and early 1960s. The links were either through France of from direct contact with teachers and schools in Taiwan, Korea or elsewhere in the Far East.

Translations from the Chinese medical classics also became more easily available. Although a Medical Acupuncture Society was set up, its members generally ignored traditional theory as being outdated and incomprehensible.

The serious students of acupuncture came from the ranks of those who were already interested in or actually practising natural medicine- osteopaths, homeopaths and naturo-paths.

For them, the Chinese ideas about medicine -although of course expressed in different terms - were similar to much of what they had already been practising.

Ideas such as the treatment of individuals rather than of a separately identified disease; treatment of the whole rather than the part; and a belief in the value of the body's own restorative powers as the key to curing disease, rather than in the suppression of symptoms.

 To many it seemed that traditional Chinese medicine had formalized and set down in terms of Yin/Yang, the Five Phases, the Eight Principles, and so on, many of the concepts they had found from their own experience, or knew instinctively.