Navigating through the sea of medicine

A while ago, I was having tea with an old colleague, discussing my plans about making the ancient tongue diagnosis texts available in English. His first reaction was quite negative and disapproving. His arguments were that “nobody in China reads these books, why would the ‘foreigners’ wish to study them?”, and also “the classics lack photographic illustrations”. The 1960 first edition of the "Chinese Medicine Tongue Diagnosis" Instead of answering these questions, in this entry I will briefly discuss about how the modern TCM tongue method managed to replace the old established classical tongue diagnosis system. Traditionally, since the Yuan Dynasty, tongue diagnosis was intimately intertwined with herbal medicine. Therefore, the “Gold Mirror Records”, the “Tongue Reflection in Cold Damage”, and all the monographs up until the late Min Guo period, such as the “Tongue Diagnosis in the National Medicine” (which I think was the last important tongue text published pre...

Modern books on Chinese Tongue Diagnosis typically contain photographs of various tongues as they manifest during the course of a variety of diseases.  This ability to r ecord and demonstrate was undeniably one of the most important contributions of modern technology to the field of medicine.     Today, modern tongue research tries to objectively standardize a variety of variables, including comparison of the tongue colours, testing the tongue pH, measuring the dry-wet state of the tongue surface, and even looking into such stuff as the incubation of bacteria and mildew on the surface of the tongue, among many others things. Researching the tongue colours and standardizing a variety of important aspects, in a way that they can be measured and examined objectively by many, may assist doctors to draw lines marking the beginning and the end of colours, so people will know for example where the red stops and the crimson begins. The idea behind this type of rese...

The earliest ideas on tongue diagnosis mostly derive from the  Cold Damage (Shang Han) theories as they were interpreted during the Tang (618 AD - 907 AD) and Song (969 AD - 1279 AD) Dynasties. Although  the Yellow Emperor’s Classic ( 黄帝内经 ) , includes  some basic Chinese medicine tongue anatomy, physiology, pathology and treatment , and  the Treatise on Cold Damage (伤寒论) suggests  some basic ideas for a tongue diagnosis, however, these theories were not by any means comprising a clinically applicable tongue diagnosis methodology. The first page of Xue Li-zhai's  first edition of  "Ao Shi Shang Han Jin Jing Lu" Sometime around the Song and Yuan Dynasties, an unknown ancient doctor known as Scholar Ao (in modern times often identified as Ao Ji-weng) produced a brief monograph called “Shang Han Dian Dian Jin” ( 伤寒点点金 ) , containing for the first time in history, twelve colour illustrations of various tongues together wi...