The Transmission of Medical Knowledge on ̒Nurturing the Fetus̓ in Early China

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilms

Early and medieval Chinese medical authors produced, preserved, and transmitted medical information on ̒nurturing the fetus̓ as an important aspect of literature on ̒nurturing life̓ and ensuring the continuation of the family lineage. This article demonstrates the origin and development of a textual tradition from the Mawangdui manuscripts in the early second century BCE to early medieval formularies such as the Beiji qianjin yaofang and material found in the Japanese compendium lshimpiō. In this process, early descriptions of the month-by-month development of the fetus and corresponding instructions for the mother were preserved almost literally, but gradually supplemented with elements that reflected developments in medical theory and practice. These include correlations between months, five phases, and internal organs according to the theory of systematic correspondences; detailed descriptions of acupuncture channels and points prohibited during each month of pregnancy; medicinal formulas for the prevention and treatment of disorders of pregnancy; and, lastly, ten line drawings that depict the monthly changes in the naked body of a pregnant woman and her fetus, as well as prohibited acupuncture channels and points. Texts on ̒nurturing the fetus̓ thus show the influence of cosmology and yin-yang theory, formulary literature, acumoxa charts and prohibitions, and vessel and visceral theory, but most importantly, a growing attention to the genderspecific medical needs of female bodies in the context of ̒formulas for women.̓

Lituanistica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Palmira Zemlevičiūtė

The article deals with the names referring to persons engaged in medicine and related sciences as used in the 1920 issues of Medicina, a medical theory and practice magazine of independent Lithuania. The author identifies their meanings and typical groups, discusses their composition and characteristics, and, to some extent, touches upon the matters of their structure and origin. The names of the actors in the medical field carry a high degree of semantic diversity and fall into four identifiable core groups: (1) the names of persons administering treatment, (2) the names of medical training persons, (3) the names of pharmacy persons, and (4) the names of persons undergoing treatment. Within these groups, names further branch off into subgroups based on a set of different, often individual aspects. Still, there are several frequently occurring aspects that should be distinguished: these are the aspects of college medical education, the connection with the military, and the qualifying degree. Although all names of these actors in the medical field are covered by the overarching seme of medicine, they all vary in differential semes. In terms of word formation, the prevailing names for the actors in the medical field are compound words with their key components mostly deriving from Lithuanian terms. Obviously, the prevalence of compounds is the outcome of the need to name different persons associated with medical science and practice, as well as patients, something that cannot be done with single-word terms. Today, many think of a scientific text as one defined by an abundance of foreign terms. The subject source of the names for the actors in the medical field is a science magazine, yet most of the names are of Lithuanian origin. Many of them are suffixal derivatives: gydytojas ‘physician’, mokovas ‘expert’, slaugytojas ‘nurse’, pribuvėja ‘midwife’, seselė ‘sister’, vaistininkas ‘pharmacist’, ligonis ‘a sick person’, džiovininkas ‘a consumptive’, etc. Loanwords are dominated by words of Latin (daktaras ‘doctor’, medikas ‘medic’, pacientas ‘patient’, provizorius ‘pharmaceutical chemist’, sanitaras (‘orderly’), etc.) and Greek (anatomas ‘anatomist’, chirurgas ‘surgeon’, fiziologas ‘physiologist’, terapeutas ‘therapist’, etc.) origin. Hybrids are not very common and usually have a borrowed root and a Lithuanian suffix (stipendininkas ‘scholar’, farmacininkas ‘pharmacist’, venerininkas ‘a male with a venereal disease’, kretinaitė ‘a female with cretinism’, and so on). Conformity with the terminological criterion can mostly be observed in the names of persons administering treatment, whereas a number of the names of persons undergoing treatment are not very terminological due to them being expressed by substantival adjectives and, typically, participles (apsikrėtusysis ‘one who has caught a disease’, pažeistasis ‘(the) affected’, sergantysis ‘(the) sick’, sveikasis ‘(the) healthy’, etc.), or descriptive word combinations (akių liga sergantysis ‘one with an eye disease’, grįžtamąja šiltine sergantysis (‘one with recurrent typhus’, etc.). In addition to linguistic and terminological evidence, the names of actors in the medical field convey a certain amount of subject-related (medical) information. Their meanings provide insight into the medical situation in Lithuania in 1920, practitioners, the most common illnesses of the period, and so on.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-447
Author(s):  
T. E. C.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher, jurist, political theorist, and founder of the doctrine of utilitarianism, was also influential in the field of medical theory and practice. Spector1 has called attention to the following data set down by Bentham more than a century and a half before the emergence of modern interest in child development. This list shows Bentham's prescience in conceptualizing the data that would need to be collected before one could properly understand the temporal steps in a child's development. 1. Advances independent of instruction: First indication of fear, smiling, recognizing persons Indication of a preference for a particular person Indication of a dislike for a particular person Attention to musical sounds Appearance of first tooth Appearance of each of the successive teeth; duration and degree of pain and illness in cutting teeth Giving toys or food to others Attempt to imitate sound laughter General progress in bodily or intellectual requirements whether uniform or by sudden degree 2. Advances dependent upon instruction: Standing, supported by one arm Standing, supporting itself by resting the hands Token of obedience to will of others Command of natural evacuation Walking, supporting itself by chairs Standing alone Walking alone Pointing out the seat of pain.


BMJ Open ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. e020658 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ni Gong ◽  
Yinhua Zhou ◽  
Yu Cheng ◽  
Xiaoqiong Chen ◽  
Xuting Li ◽  
...  

ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate the practice of informed consent in China from the perspective of patients.DesignA qualitative study using in-depth interviews with in-hospital patients focusing on personal experience with informed consent.SettingGuangdong Province, China.Participants71 in-hospital patients in rehabilitation after surgical operations were included.ResultsMedical information is not actively conveyed by doctors nor effectively received by patients. Without complete and understandable information, patients are unable to make an autonomous clinical decision but must sign an informed consent form following the doctor’s medical arrangement. Three barriers to accessing medical information by patients were identified: (1) medical information received by patients was insufficient to support their decision-making, (2) patients lacked medical knowledge to understand the perceptions of doctors and (3) patient–doctor interactions were insufficient in clinical settings.ConclusionsInformed consent is implemented as an administrative procedure at the hospital level in China. However, it has not been embedded in doctors’ clinical practices because, from the perspective of patients, doctors do not fulfil the obligation of medical information provision. As a result, the informed part of informed consent was neglected by individual doctors in China. Reforming medical education, monitoring the process of informed consent in clinical settings and redesigning medical institutional arrangements are pathways to restoring the practice of informed consent and patient-centred models in China.


Author(s):  
T. Parnikoza ◽  
Y. Trufanov ◽  
N. Svyrydova ◽  
G. Chupryna

Improvement of the course on the topic "Reflexotherapy Specialization" of the lecture material on the topic "Use of reflexotherapy for craniocerebral traumas" would help to solve the problem of reducing the pharmacological burden on patients and, consequently, minimizing possible complications and side effects of pharmacotherapy. The theory and practice of reflexology is accelerated by a physician-clinician, which contributes to the problematic teaching methodology, which is based on the formation of problems in clinical situations, which greatly increases the activity of the students, targets them for practical activity, improves the mastering of the theoretical program. During lectures on the specialty cycle of reflexology, such problem situations are widely used, when the teacher creates a certain contradiction of real facts on the basis of generalized medical knowledge, creates a problematic situation and solves it together with the listeners.


2020 ◽  
pp. 118-137
Author(s):  
Rosamond Rhodes

This chapter explains three central physician duties that clearly set medical ethics apart from common morality: nonjudgmental regard, nonsexual regard, and confidentiality. Because patients will not trust doctors when they are not confident in the doctor’s devotion and commitment to meeting their medical needs, doctors must avoid any intimation of judging a patient unworthy of care. Because doctors need their patients to trust that the intimacy of the doctor-patient relationship has no sexual overtones in spite of the revelation, nudity, and touching, doctors must maintain nonsexual regard in their patient interactions. Because doctors need patients to divulge intimate personal details about their behavior and history in order to make accurate diagnoses and develop treatment plans, patients must be able to trust their doctors to uphold confidentiality and only share medical information with other professionals on a need-to-know basis. These duties are explained and illustrated with numerous case examples.


1997 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
GEORGE C. ALTER ◽  
ANN G. CARMICHAEL

On November 11–14 1993, Indiana University hosted a conference on the ‘History of Registration of Causes of Death’, with funding from the US National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The conference brought together historians of medicine and historically-oriented demographers and epidemiologists to discuss the origins of the recording of causes of death and the possible uses of these documents in demographic and epidemiological research. Demographers and epidemiologists would like to use long-run series of causes of death to examine the effects of social and economic conditions, the availability of health care, and specific risk factors on mortality. Many important questions (such as the effects of early health experiences on old-age morbidity and mortality) are best studied with data on changes over long periods of time. However, it is very difficult to construct a consistent series of deaths by cause over time because advances in medical theory and practice have led to significant changes in the classification of diseases. For example, it is unclear whether the prevalence of heart disease was increasing, decreasing, or constant before 1940, because heart disease was often classified under other categories.The essays in this special number of Continuity and Change offer a range of insights on the historical circumstances in which cause-of-death registration emerged. They help us to see the ways in which medical theory, medical practitioners, and their increasingly influential professional organizations shaped the conceptualization of reporting of causes of death. Günter Risse's ‘Causes of death as a historical problem’ serves as an overview of the problems that social historians of medicine find underlying any continuous history of mortality experience. Above all, he argues, medical historians react as historians, wary of Whiggish confidence in state records without attention to the ideologies governing their creation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 133-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAPHAELA VEIT

Constantine the African's significance as the first important translator of medical texts from Arabic into Latin is indisputable due to the fact that his work contributed decisively to the enlargement of medical knowledge in the Latin West. Among his considerable œuvre the translation of al-Maˇgūsī's Kitāb al-Malakī under its Latin title Pantegni, the first real medical compendium in Latin, holds a particularly important position because of its popularity. The Pantegni is divided into the two parts Theory and Practice with ten books each. Yet while the Theorica Pantegni corresponds basically to the Theory in the Kitāb al-Malakī, this is only partly the case for the Practica Pantegni. The content of the differing parts has been put together mainly from other medical texts. The identification of these other medical texts was the aim of some important researches while the last ten years (see especially the articles in Charles Burnett and Danielle Jacquart [eds.], Constantine the African and ‘Alī ibn ‘Abbās al-Maˇgūsī: The Pantegni and Related Texts [Leiden / New York / Cologne, 1994]). The aim of this article is to present the sources of the Pantegni, Practica’s third book and to give some indications on the person who made the compilation who – as it seems – wasn't Constantine the African himself.


2021 ◽  
Vol 99 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 361-368
Author(s):  
V. P. Stolyar ◽  
P. E. Krainyukov

The article represents the issues of information and analytical support of clinicians. The article deals with the theory and practice of creating a digital subsystem of medical support for the population and a modern system for examination and treatment, the collection, storage and use of medical information in the databases of medical organizations, as well as data processing centers and situational control centers of the federal level or subjects of the Russian Federation. The basic principles of digital medicine, such as continuous development, mobility of doctors and patients, as well as the interaction of sensors and executive devices are discussed.


Author(s):  
Ruiping FAN

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.本文試圖綜合本期各篇文章的主要觀點,依據“目的”、“體驗”和“價值”三條線索來對傳統中醫和現代西醫做一初步的評價。由於醫學的內在目的在於防治疾病、維護健康,而不是追求真理、認識世界,因而中醫與西醫都可以發揮作用,現代化研究與傳統式探索也可以並行不諱,只要有助於醫學的目的即可。此外,西方醫學從傳統走向現代的過程,乃是從重視病人的親身感受轉向注重病理解剖事實的過程,而中醫學體系提供了一種不同的臨床現象學。最後,醫學是負荷看價值和意識形態的人類活動,應當超越當前的技術烏托邦傾向,成為良好生活方式的一個和諧部分。The contemporary world is characteristic of science-fetishism and technological utopia. Every social issue is explored in the name of science, and all difficult problems are to be resolved by renovated technologies. This is even more so in modern China than in the West. The people attempt to modernize their lives in all respects. For many of them, everything old needs to be weighed on a modern scientific scale and anything unscientific must be rejected. This constitutes the context in which traditional Chinese medicine is generally evaluated. This essay argues that this context is misleading. It intends to reevaluate traditional Chinese versus modern Western medicine in consideration of the internal aim of medicine, patients, experiences, and ideologies and values.There has been a long-standing debate in China in this century regarding whether or not traditional Chinese medicine is a science. Both sides of the debate, ironically, agree that if traditional Chinese medicine is not a science, it should be abandoned. However, this debate is non-sensical. Medicine as medicine, whether it is a traditional medicine or a modern medicine, is not a science. Medicine is not a science because its internal aim differs from the aim of science. While the internal aim of science can be identified as pursuing truth and knowing the world, the internal aim of medicine consists in maintaining health as well as treating and preventing diseases. Undoubtedly, modern Western medicine is scientific. Its theories and practices are based upon typical modern sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology. But medicine as medicine does not have to be scientific. Given the internal aim of medicine, as long as a practice or method contributes to the treatment of disease or the promotion of health, it is legitimate. The existence of varieties of non-scientific alternative medicine and faith medicine in the US where modern science and technology are most advanced, is a good example of this. To put it in a famous Chinese saying, "whether it is a white cat or a black cat, as long as it catchesthe mouse, it is a good cat."No one can deny the tremendous achievements that modern scientific medicine has made in fighting diseases. However, focused on a technologized anatomico-pathologic view of the body and diseases, contemporary medicine discounts the significance of patient complaints and it is naturally easy to lose sight of the non-technological aspects of medical practice, especially the experience of the sick person. Traditional Chinese medical theory and practice provide a heuristic alternative. By viewing the essence of illness as symptom-complex rather than anatomico-pathological lesion, by identifying imbalanced climate and emotional factors rather than disease entities as the sources of illnesses, by using ordinary contacts rather than complicated lab and mechanical investigations as medical examining tools, by focusing on the experience of being sick rather than on pathological anatomy, by following balancing rather than curing as the treatment principle, and by emphasizing prevention rather than treatment, traditionalChinese medicine offers a systematic medical phenomenological system in which a patient’s life experience and intuitive knowledge of the body is the center of clinical practice.Finally, medical theory and practice are value-laden. "Our ideologies and expectations concerning the world move us to select certain states as illnesses because of our judgment as to what is dysfunctional or a deformity and to select certain causal sequences,etiological patterns, as being of interest to us because they are bound to groups of phenomena we identify as illnesses" (Engelhardt). Our ideologies and expectations also move us to select certain modes of medicine and therapeutic methods as most useful and promising because of our judgments about the appropriateness and efficacy of practical instruments. Accordingly, practicing and accepting medicine is part of a way of life. As people accept different value systems and life expectations, they must be careful about what medicine and technology they want to accept and develop. We must reflect on the contemporary ideology of technological utopia that intends to resolve all problems by newly developed complicated technologies. Not all conflicts and tensions of life can be resolved by technologies. What is worse, the overwhelmingly powerful incentive to develop high tech medicine in the third-world countries would drain on their scarce health care resources, which would significantly harm most people in those countries.DOWNLOAD HISTORY | This article has been downloaded 15 times in Digital Commons before migrating into this platform.


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