Needham And Sivin Chinese Medicine Concept And Its Contrast

Chinese medicine, with the history of five thousand years' culture and practice, is an important part of the whole medical civilization. But there have always been disputes over whether it should be abandoned or not since the modernization of China. However, there are few relatively thorough and systematic researches on the viewpoint of Chinese medicine of contemporary occidental, which combine the insight into history of medicine with new views of contemporary science philosophy. Based on the investigation of the medical opinion of Joseph Needham and Nathan Sivin, and the analysis of the related academic background, standpoint of historiography, conception of science, methods of research, the thesis tries to reveal the new progress of the West's working on the history of Chinese medicine, that is, the research of Chinese Medicine tends to combine the medical anthropology, medical sociology and medical history more and more tightly. In fact, there is such a comparatively wide space of thought from Needham's classical perspective and method to Sivin's opinion that accords with the trend of modern philosophy, which is favorable to clarify many important problems in the research of the history of Chinese medicine. Some of Sivin's latest research results might be helpful to break the impasse in the situation that most Chinese research on medicine falls into the tradition of positivism and certain special conception of science. And they may cause scholars to pay attention to popular medicine, religious curing, and the therapy of minorities also, not only focus on classical elite medicine--just as Sivin said that the history of Chinese medicine ignored the physicians who were not elite authors. What's more, because of the particularity of medicine, it is necessary to try to study Chinese medicine from the eyes of patients as well as from the perspectives of gender, ethnic group and social class, so that new apprehension can be acquired.