Ancient Documents Of Pediatric Diseases Treated By

The therapy of pricking the collateral vessels to drain blood was, in ancient times, known as "awakening the vessels" or "pricking the collaterals," and in modern times is known by many names such as "lancing and bleeding" and "bloodletting therapy." This refers to an external treatment method using the three-edged needle, the lancet or other tools to release a certain amount of blood from the patient’s superficial blood vessel networks, or from other particular areas of the body, in order to treat and prevent disease. In the fourth century B.C. the Hippocratic Corpus of ancient Greece recorded many references to the use of bloodletting therapy in the practice of medicine. In the ancient Chinese medical literature, the therapeutic lancing and draining of blood from the collateral vessels was systematically summarized in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, including theoretical foundations, techniques, tools, anatomical locations, prescribed bleeding dosages, and suitable indications and contraindications. As medicine developed over the long course of history, many physicians in successive dynasties took the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic as their foundation and, combined with their individual clinical experiences, produced noteworthy additions and developments to the existing body of knowledge on bloodletting therapy.This thesis breaks new ground in the pediatric field by investigating relevant content in ancient texts describing the utilization of bloodletting therapy as treatment for pediatric diseases. Pediatrics, from its primitive beginnings, has developed to become an independent and complete discipline through the continuous accumulation of practical experience, shaping a systematic field that now accounts for the special physiology and pathophysiology of children, commonly encountered pediatric diseases and their symptom-pattern differentiation, as well as their treatment. For example, frequently encountered diseases in pediatrics, such as the four great maladies of measles, pox, syncope, and malnutrition, have historically all been described with remarkably effective theories of diagnosis, treatment, and herbal prescriptions. However, there is a paucity of specialized research in the ancient literature regarding the theories and uses of bloodletting therapy for treating pediatric diseases, despite the great contribution to pediatric healthcare that this technique has made over thousands of years through modern times. Bloodletting therapy still continues to be widely used in clinical practice and is irreplaceably valuable because of its ease of execution and remarkable effectiveness. This thesis examines the ancient Chinese medical literature from the early Qin through the Qing Dynasties for contributions from physicians that describe the use of bloodletting therapy for pediatric diseases, and extensively catalogues, organizes, analyzes and summarizes the special features and appropriate conditions in which bloodletting therapy has been used in pediatrics over successive dynasties.This thesis is divided into two sections. The first section organizes the ancient Chinese medical literature on bloodletting therapy for children according to dynastic order, and summarizes the pediatric diseases that were able to be treated through bloodletting in classical times, including approximately forty different categories of illnesses altogether. The second section is an analysis of the reviewed content that summarizes the special characteristics of pediatric bloodletting as described in ancient Chinese medical texts, which in general focuses on the five sense organs of the craniofacial unit and surgical conditions, employs relatively smaller bleeding dosages, and is often performed in localized areas around the focal disease manifestation.In summary, this thesis has reviewed and analyzed data retrieved from the ancient Chinese medical literature, with the hope that this effort will help us comprehensively inherit, develop and transmit this valuable scholarly experience, as well as provide a theoretical and practical basis for the modern clinical use of bloodletting therapy in traditional Chinese pediatrics.