Hippocratic Medicine in China: Comparison with a 9th Century Chinese Manual on Bone Setting

• Main Author: Fu Louis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2014-12-01
• Series: Journal of Orthopaedics, Trauma and Rehabilitation
• Subjects: bone setting; Chinese medicine; Hippocratic Corpus; history of medicine
• Online Access: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2210491714000542

Chinese history annals recorded cultural interchange between China and the Roman Empire during the Han dynasty. The first medical missionaries were Nestorian Christians from the Middle East who arrived in China in ad 635. They introduced Western medical practice into China. This paper compares the first comprehensive Chinese treatise on bone and joint injuries by a hermit monk named Lin and the Hippocratic Corpus. Based on external knowledge from the author's background as well as textural comparison the text of Hippocrates, a remarkable similarity is noted. Although these similarities could have arisen by chance, it is reasonable to hypothesize that traditional bone setting in China originated from the Hippocratic tradition and was later integrated with indigenous herbal medicine.