I. Traditional Chinese Medicine Developed in a World Completely Different from Modern Medicine

I. Traditional Chinese Medicine Developed in a World Completely Different from Modern Medicine

Like other disciplines, medicine—being part of the superstructure of society—has a close relationship with the economic foundations upon which it exists. Traditional Chinese medicine emerged and developed during the long period of feudal society. In slave society, due to low levels of productivity, there was no economic foundation for medicine; people relied on religious practices and witchcraft to seek survival. Starting in the 3rd–4th centuries BCE, as a new landlord class rose to prominence, China transitioned from slavery to feudalism—a significant transformation that marked a major revolution in productive forces, breaking free from the shackles of slave owners. Agriculture and handicrafts began to flourish, and the earliest theories of traditional Chinese medicine were born during this period. The emergence of the outstanding physician Bian Que marked the separation between Chinese medicine and witchcraft, and Chinese medicine became an independent discipline. Over the following 2,000 years, China remained in a feudal and semi-feudal society, where the economic foundation—based primarily on individual agriculture and handicrafts—never truly changed. Given this characteristic, it was impossible for traditional Chinese medicine to produce tools like microscopes or X-ray machines, which are only possible with modern industrial production; nor could it develop the advanced tools required for biochemical, pathological, and clinical diagnosis and treatment. Therefore, when practicing medicine, doctors could only observe the external manifestations of disease and the subjective feelings of patients; beyond that, the only tools available were the doctors’ thinking and analytical abilities. Traditional Chinese medicine developed against this backdrop. What about Western medicine? Its development environment was entirely different from that of traditional Chinese medicine. From the mid-16th century to the early 17th century, after the Industrial Revolution in England, large-scale industries powered by steam engines emerged, and capitalist society first appeared in the West. With this transformed economic foundation, the superstructure of society inevitably underwent corresponding changes. With the invention of the microscope, the discovery of bacteria, and the simultaneous advancements in biochemistry, pathology, and anatomy, Western medicine emerged onto the global medical stage in a completely new form.

We say that traditional Chinese medicine developed on the basis of agriculture and handicrafts, while Western medicine developed on the basis of large-scale industry. Precisely because of this, traditional Chinese medicine, without advanced tools, relied solely on doctors’ senses and minds to analyze and synthesize conditions, thereby achieving the goal of differential diagnosis and treatment; Western medicine, on the other hand, could utilize advanced tools to conduct systematic and intuitive research on the series of changes caused by pathogens within the body.