Soothsaying and exorcism may be traced far back to the fifth and sixth centuries B.C.

In times of epidemic the specialists of Wu-ism, who act as seers, soothsayers and exorcists, engage in processions, stripped to the waist, dancing in a frantic, delirious state, covering themselves with blood by means of prick-balls, or with needles thrust through their tongues, or sitting or stretching themselves on nail points or rows of sword edges.  In this way they frighten the spectres of disease.  They are nearly all young, and are spoken of as “divining youths,” and they use an exorcising magic based on the principle that legions of spectres prone to evil live in the machine of the world. (De Groot, vi, 983-985.)

The Chinese believe that it is the Tao, or “Order of the Universe,” which affords immunity from evil, and according to whether or no the birth occurred in a beneficent year, dominated by four double cyclical characters, the horoscope is “heavy” or “light.”  Those with light horoscopes are specially prone to incurable complaints, but much harm can be averted if such an individual be surrounded with exorcising objects, if he be given proper amulets to wear and proper medicines to swallow, and by selecting for him auspicious days and hours.

Two or three special points may be referred to.  The doctrine of the pulse reached such extraordinary development that the whole practice of the art centred round its different characters.  There were scores of varieties, which in complication and detail put to confusion the complicated system of some of the old Graeco-Roman writers.  The basic idea seems to have been that each part and organ had its own proper pulse, and just as in a stringed instrument each chord has its own tone, so in the human body, if the pulses were in harmony, it meant health; if there was discord, it meant disease.  These Chinese views reached Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there is a very elaborate description of them in Floyer’s well-known book.(27) And the idea of harmony in the pulse is met with into the eighteenth century.

     (27) Sir John Floyer:  The Physician’s Pulse Watch, etc.,
     London, 1707.

Organotherapy was as extensively practiced in China as in Egypt.  Parts of organs, various secretions and excretions are very commonly used.  One useful method of practice reached a remarkable development, viz., the art of acupuncture—­the thrusting of fine needles more or less deeply into the affected part.  There are some 388 spots on the body in which acupuncture could be performed, and so well had long experience taught them as to the points of danger, that the course of the arteries may be traced by the tracts that are avoided.  The Chinese practiced inoculation for smallpox as early as the eleventh century.

Even the briefest sketch of the condition of Chinese medicine leaves the impression of the appalling stagnation and sterility that may afflict a really intelligent people for thousands of years.  It is doubtful if they are today in a very much more advanced condition than were the Egyptians at the time when the Ebers Papyrus was written.  From one point of view it is an interesting experiment, as illustrating the state in which a people may remain who have no knowledge of anatomy, physiology or pathology.