Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 29

Nowadays, people say that the ancestor of medical classics is the Yellow Emperor's Internal Classic. It should be noted that the Internal Classic is named after the Yellow Emperor, but it has nothing to do with the Yellow Emperor. It cannot be said that there is no relationship at all. The Yellow Emperor myth was compiled by people in the Warring States Period, and the earliest chapter in the Internal Classic was also written by people in the Warring States Period. The Internal Classic we have seen is a collection of papers, which was finalized into a book probably in the Eastern Han Dynasty. The articles included were written by people in the Warring States Period and by Han people. There are also some contents that were mixed in by later generations and became chapters later. This book is the foundation of Chinese medicine theory. The model of heaven and man it established is unshakable in Chinese medicine.

The Neijing is divided into two parts, one is Suwen and the other is Lingshu. In fact, we can also divide the Neijing into two parts in another way, one is empirical medicine and the other is philosophy.

The Neijing mentioned that the ancients were in good health and lived to be a hundred years old. In fact, the average life expectancy of ancient people was at most thirty or forty years old. There was no way to treat external injuries or internal diseases. As late as the Shang Dynasty, King Wu Ding had an eye disease and had no way to cure it, so he had to consult divination. Ordinary people could only endure the pain. Over thousands of years, people have accumulated some knowledge of medicines bit by bit. It was not easy, because the discovery of each medicine was almost driven by desperation. If they were not desperate, who would try those terrible minerals and grass stems?

After going through untold hardships, ancient empirical medicine finally gained a small scale. Just as it got rid of the witches, it attracted philosophers. Philosophers noticed the achievements of medicine and could not wait to give it a theory. The value of "Inner Canon" in later generations is different from that in the Han Dynasty; in later generations, people paid more attention to its theory, and as for the empirical medical content, specific acupuncture methods and prescriptions in it, they were rarely followed. At that time, the value of a medical book also lay in how many means of curing diseases it provided. "Fifty-two Disease Prescriptions" and "Eleven Pulse Moxibustion Classics" unearthed from Mawangdui are more typical medical books of the time than "Inner Canon".

When I read the "Inner Canon of Medicine", I read the content of empirical medicine. Although I don't understand it very much, I admire it very much, because it was written two thousand years ago; when I read the philosophical part, especially the long philosophical lectures in "Suwen", I can only frown, because what I see here is the invasion of philosophy into medicine, the interference of a priori with empirical evidence, and the contempt of meditation for observation. Adrian Lu criticized Chinese medicine for not talking about anatomy, which was very sharp. In the past two thousand years, Chinese medicine has acquired rich drug knowledge and developed diagnostic techniques, but the accumulation of anatomical knowledge is not commendable. --- How far the medicine in the "Inner Canon of Medicine" is from human physiology is how far the medicine in later generations is from it. In fact, in some aspects, it is even further away. For example, the meridians mentioned by doctors in the Han Dynasty, although not necessarily in accordance with the truth, refer to an actual circulatory system. The meridians mentioned by later generations have greatly weakened their physiological significance.