From 'remedy highly esteemed' to 'barbarous practice': The rise and fall of acupuncture in nineteenth-century America

This thesis analyzes the prevalent use of acupuncture in nineteenth-century American medicine. Using medical journal articles, school catalogs, lecture notes, fee tables, newspaper clippings and other primary sources, I argue against the modern myth that New York Times reporter James Reston "discovered" acupuncture and brought it to the United States in the early 1970s. My research clearly shows that information on acupuncture first came to the United States not from Reston, but from European physicians - specifically, from French and British practitioners in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They used acupuncture to conduct experiments on patients suffering from various ailments. Research also indicates that the practice enjoyed considerable popularity in the United States as far back as the early part of the nineteenth century, with American physicians conducting similar experiments on patients in an effort to determine acupuncture's underlying mechanism of action. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, acupuncture essentially disappeared as a form of healing in the United States, and physicians all but abandoned the practice. Relying on the same sources that support my argument concerning acupuncture's early rise and increased use, I argue that no single event or circumstance can account for this change, but rather that a variety of social and cultural factors contributed to acupuncture's rapid decline among American medical practitioners.