Photo Essay: Bringing Acupuncture to the People

This photo essay examines key events in the career of physician-activist Tolbert Small, a doctor for the Black Panther Party and one of the first American doctors to practice acupuncture. It features the historic 1972 Black Panther Party delegation to China where Small first learned about acupuncture, as well as the Harriet Tubman Medical Office where he incorporated acupuncture into his practice.

Reflections on (Re)making History

Who and what makes history? This essay describes how physician-activist Tolbert Small (b. 1942) has been collecting, preserving, and recording his own history, as well as of those around him. Small has been practicing medicine in California’s San Francisco Bay Area since 1968, serving a diversity of patients: from thousands of community members to revolutionaries such as Angela Davis and George Jackson. A physician for the Black Panther Party from 1970 to 1974, Small joined the party’s 1972 delegation to China, where he witnessed acupuncture. He then integrated the practice into his medical toolkit upon returning home. Small’s personal archives document an important chapter of American social and medical history. His stories, along with those of the revolutionaries who introduced acupuncture into New York City’s Lincoln Detox Center during the 1970s, ask us to revisit conventional historical narratives as well as the way in which acupuncture history is made.

Fighting Medical Racism with Education and Action

Denise Tyson is the president of the Maryland Acupuncture Society (US), one of the state-level professional organizations that comprises the American Society of Acupuncturists. Following the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, she called on her colleagues in the acupuncture profession to take meaningful action against racism and to educate themselves about the long history of racist violence against African Americans. In July 2020 an editor of Asian Medicine interviewed Tyson to learn about her medical career and her perspectives on race and health care. The main themes of the interview include: her affinity for acupuncture and Chinese medicine, her experiences with racial bias in both biomedicine and integrative medicine, strategies for making acupuncture organizations more inclusive, and the crucial role that education plays in combating racism.

Black Lives and Asian Medicine

This essay examines the intersections between Asian medicines, racial healthcare inequities, and social justice movements, and explains how they are illuminated by the interviews and essays in this special issue. Important themes include: how the protests following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 spurred US organizations of alternative, complementary, and integrative medicine to undertake antiracist initiatives; how acupuncturists have been working to properly acknowledge the contributions of African American practitioners in their historical narratives; and how acupuncture may be a useful tool for mitigating racial health disparities.

Acupuncture, the Black Panther Party, and People’s Medicine

Tolbert Small (b. 1943) is a physician and civil rights activist best known for his advocacy for research on sickle cell anemia. In the summer of 2020 two of Asian Medicine’s editors, Daniel Burton-Rose and Yi-Li Wu, interviewed Small about his clinical career of more than fifty years. The interview focuses on Small’s experience with acupuncture, the practice of Chinese medicine in the United States, and his commitment to social justice. Small was introduced to acupuncture in 1972 as a member of a delegation of the Black Panther Party to the People’s Republic of China, and he incorporated it into his clinical practice upon his return to Oakland, California. Small began practicing acupuncture at a time when instructional materials and therapeutic implements were difficult to obtain. He witnessed the gradual mainstreaming of Chinese medicine in the United States, accompanied by problems of differential access based on race and income.