Saving Chinese Medicine for Modern Warfare in China: A Study Note

The considerable research already conducted on the second Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 has mainly addressed military and diplomatic affairs, though research on relevant cultural and even medical history has gradually picked up pace in recent years (Watt 2011 [2013?]; Keith 2011). However, most of the research on modern Chinese medical history, especially traditional Chinese medicine, has little to do with war (Pi 2020). Let me start with a brief review of some related literature. Social historians of medicine in the West have focused much on the effects of war on civilian medicine in general and upon medical policy in particular. Mark Harrison, for example, comments on the processes of both the “medicalization of war,” or how medical personnel were incorporated into the armed forces, and the ensuing “militarization of medicine,” whereby the former process affected the practice of medicine (Harrison 1996). How these processes developed in the case of China, with its long history of traditional Chinese medicine, is only beginning to be researched. As we shall see, the field of medicine in China had a very different relationship to these processes, particularly during the Second World War. For example, Michael Shiyung Liu has recently raised the issue of “Chinese physique” in a study on Chinese military nutrition (Liu 2019). Interestingly, this concept had existed in Chinese medicine as early as the confrontation with Western medicine in the 1920s. However, there is a lack of in-depth discussion within the academic community about the history and impact of Chinese medicine upon the medicalization of war and the militarization of medicine. If the war had such a positive impact on the development of Western medicine, then what was the impact of war on traditional Chinese practices? The purpose of this note, therefore, is to explore the actions of practitioners of Chinese medicine in dealing with the urgent need that arose from the Sino-Japanese War for surgery and for the modification of Chinese medicine.