Chinese Acupuncture (L'Acuponcture Chinoise) (review)

Reviews 269 in a city like San Francisco, they may experience conflicts with older Chinese immigrants and local-born Chinese. And finally, although this volume is about Hong Kong's experience, how does its neighbor Macau fit into the picture? On the whole, however, this book offers a good, comprehensive overview of Chinese emigration from Hong Kong. It forcefully drives home the theme that emigration today is responsive to the dynamics ofthe global economic system. A U.S. petroleum engineer may work in Saudi Arabia, while his family lives in Houston , Texas. An English exporter may conduct business in Belgium while headquartered in France, even as his family lives in London. From this vantage point, the Hong Kong businessmen and professionals who maintain "diasporic families" and jet back and forth across the Pacific may well be representative of the changing character ofinternational business and global migration. Franklin Ng California State University, Fresno Georges Soulié de Morant. Chinese Acupuncture (L'Acuponcture Chinoise). Translated by Lawrence Grinnell, Claudy Jeanmougin, and Maurice Leveque. Edited by Paul Zmiewski. Brookline, Massachusetts: Paradigm Publications, 1994. xxxii, 896 pp. Hardcover $125.00, isbn 0-912111-31-3. Chinese Acupuncture is the first complete translation into English of Georges Soulié de Morant's monumental work L'Acuponcture Chinoise. On first inspection this is a manual for instructing clinicians in the practice of acumoxa therapy. Intended to bring classical Chinese medicine to die West, it has today become a classic in its own right. L'Acuponcture Chinoise is not , however, merely a clinical textbook. It is also a book about medicine and the relation between different medical traditions. And therein lies its significance to a much wider and not necessarily clinically oriented audience. Born in Paris in 1879, Soulié de Morant was prevented from following the medical career he had chosen for himselfby the early death ofhis father. Having learned Mandarin as a child, he went, instead, to China in 1901 in die employ-© 1996 by University ment 0fme Banque Lehideux. His linguistic abilities (he also learned Mongolian ofHawai?Pressan(1 JaP3J16Sg)1 nls knowledge ofChinese culture, and his easyfamiliaritywith Chinese customs soon brought him to the attention ofthe French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He subsequently became a judge of the joint French court of 270 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 Shanghai and later the delegate Consul of Foreign Affairs in Yunnan. In his spare time he was an erudite and prolific writer who published more than sixty books and articles on every aspect of Chinese life, from art to music, history, and literature , including biographies ofthe empress dowager Ci Xi and Sun Yatsen. Soon after his arrival in China, Soulié de Morant witnessed how a Chinese physician was able to help the victims of a cholera epidemic in Beijing without recourse to Western medicine. His curiosity aroused, Soulié de Morant began to read medical texts and, with the help ofthe local officials, to study acupuncture under several renowned physicians. He later practiced it himself, and it is reported that Soulié de Morant's knowledge and skills were such that he became respected by the Chinese—an unheard ofaccomplishment for a foreigner, then or now. Following his return to Europe in 1917, Soulié de Morant decided to promote acupuncture in the French medical profession by publishing articles based on translations from the Chinese. He managed to attract the attention of two physicians , Drs. Flandin and Martiny, and was invited to join them at their departments at the Bichat and Leopold Bellan Hospitals. This afforded him die opportunity not merely to practice, but to carry out detailed research into various aspects ofacumoxa therapy. L'Acuponcture Chinoise is the distillation ofSoulié de Morant's understanding of Chinese medicine, written on the basis ofover thirty years ofclinical experience and research. It was an attempt at making Chinese medicine intelligible to an audience that shared none ofthe familiarity with Chinese language, history, or culture that its author possessed, and in that it largely succeeded. In spite of sometimes open and bitter hostility from the medical establishment, which believed that its mission was to teach modern medicine to the East and not to learn traditional practices from China, the publication...