"TCM is a deliberate or unintentional liar"? Lu Xun: I am venting my anger

Lu Xun's attitude towards Chinese medicine is a question worth studying. Some people believe that Lu Xun has a critical and negative attitude towards Chinese medicine; some believe that Lu Xun has always attached importance to and loved Chinese medicine; and some believe that Lu Xun's understanding and attitude toward Chinese medicine have a development process from negativity to affirmation with the development of his thinking. So, how exactly should this issue be evaluated? In fact, what is Lu Xun's attitude towards Chinese medicine, which is a problem that is not difficult to solve. Because of his article, we can draw conclusions from it. Lu Xun talks about Chinese medicine in many places in his article, and the time span is also very large. The earliest reference to Chinese medicine was in the "Scream self-prologue" written on December 3, 1922: "I still remember the previous doctors' discussions and prescriptions, compared with what I know now, I gradually realized that Chinese medicine is nothing more than a deliberate or unintentional liar, and at the same time sympathy for the deceived patient and his family; and from the translated history, I know the fact that the Japanese restoration originated mostly in Western medicine." This is also a strong evidence that people often use to illustrate Mr. Lu Xun's opposition to Chinese medicine. On January 15, 1925, Lu Xun took advantage of his convenience at the Sendai Medical College in Japan to receive good training and knowledge in anatomy, and wrote "Sudden Thought (I)", lamenting that although Chinese medicine has a long history, it lacks a reliable anatomy as a basic medical knowledge, and points out that the Neijing and the Records of Washing Injustice have a lot of nonsense about the structure of human muscles, so that they are chaotic. On October 30, 1925, Based on his personal experience in treating toothache, Lu Xun wrote "From Beard to Teeth". It is said that he has been one of the "toothache parties" since he was a child, teeth or moths or broken, and finally bleeding gums, Lu Xun when he studied in Japan tried the "test prescription" in China, put on a unilateral party, saw Chinese medicine, took soup medicine, did not see the curative effect, was said to suffer from extremely difficult to treat "tooth loss", but later to Nagasaki, Japan, only spent two yuan of consultation money, spent an hour, the doctor scraped off the "tooth mound" after the tooth, and then no longer bleeding. Later, when he read Chinese medical books, he suddenly found a shocking theory: teeth belong to the kidneys, and the cause of "tooth loss" is "yin loss". Only then did I realize that others were framing themselves and saying "some people say how reliable Chinese medicine is, how smart it is unilaterally, and I still don't believe it"

On October 7, 1926, Lu Xun wrote a memorable essay entitled "Father's Disease". This article was actually adapted and expanded on the basis of Lu Xun's article "My Father" written in 1919. Although "My Father" is only a short story of more than 500 words, it can be said that it is the source of "Father's Disease" from the scene before the death of "my" father described by the shaoxing "Guangyutang" pharmacy where the teenager Lu Xun often went to buy medicine for his father. "Father's Disease" is about 3,400 words, which is more than six times more than "My Father". And most of its addition is a sneer at Chinese medicine. The "famous doctor" who first came to see Lu Xun's father was a person with extremely high medical expenses, and it is said that he once treated a girlfriend from an outsider's family, but he just looked at it hastily and said something like "it doesn't matter", and as a result, he was cured to death. It was this "famous doctor" who treated Lu Xun's father for two years, but his condition continued to deteriorate without getting any better, and in the end, he recommended another doctor named Chen Lianhe and left on his own. Therefore, in this doctor Chen Lianhe's formula, there are "cricket pairs" with "original nests", "no one knows", "ten flat wood plants", and "defeat drum skin pills" made of broken old drum skins. Regarding crickets, Lu Xun also said sarcastically: "Insects must also be chaste, continue strings or re-pickle, and even lose their qualifications to do medicine." He also attached an explanation to the "Drum Skin Pill": Because his father's illness was "edema", alias "bulging", "you can naturally subdue him with the broken drum skin". From the above excerpts, it can be clearly seen that Lu Xun is prejudiced and even quite disgusted with Chinese medicine. At that time, the geologist Ding Wenjiang made a couplet: "Climbing mountains, eating meat, cursing Chinese medicine, old age is not old; writing, drinking and speaking official language, it is difficult to know that it is difficult to do." It can be seen that the general climate of scolding Chinese medicine at that time was also the consensus and common action of the self-proclaimed new wave people at that time. As soon as Western medicine was introduced to China, the bride was even more favored by three points of incense, and it was only natural to regard Western medicine as a model of science. In particular, due to the profundity and mystery of Chinese medicine, on the surface it seems that there is indeed a distance from science and superstition, and it is "logical" to regard Chinese medicine as superstition.

However, what is Mr. Lu Xun's attitude towards Chinese medicine? Although Mr. Lu Xun studied in Japan, his understanding of Traditional Chinese Culture is also relatively profound, which can be seen from the "Historical Outline of Chinese Novels" he wrote. His criticism of TCM also gives reasons: "Until now, even if some people say how reliable TCM is and how smart it is, I still don't believe it. Naturally, most of them were because they delayed my father's illness, but I was afraid that I was also carrying some personal grudges of pain. To know his father's "bulging" disease, Western medicine at that time can be said to be helpless, incurable disease, even in today's highly developed Western medicine, is also a difficult disease. Because Chinese medicine "healed death" his father, who suffered from "incurable diseases", he said that Chinese medicine was a "liar" on "carrying a personal grudge", which is in line with Lu Xun's style, but it does not mean that he completely rejected Chinese medicine.

In his essay "Experience", Lu Xun fully affirmed Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica", and then believed that medicine was not created by sages, but a summary of the working people's struggle against diseases for thousands of years: "People have probably known that all cultural relics are gradually caused by the unknown clans of the past. Architecture, cooking, fishing and hunting, farming, all of them, medicine. From this passage, we can see that Lu Xun believes that although there is a place in Traditional Chinese Medicine to "catch the wind and catch the shadow", more importantly, he believes that Chinese medicine is the accumulation of many anonymous experiences in history, and it is the same as architecture, cooking, fishing and hunting, farming, from a very early age, it has served us, and it is not like some people say that it is "feudal medicine". When Lu Xun was in Shanghai, he often met with Mr. Zhou Jianren, and the brothers always talked after tea and dinner. The content of the conversation, which will talk from botany to the "Compendium of Materia Medica" or other Chinese medicine such as the use of raw herbs to cure emergency diseases, etc., also praised some of the prescriptions on the "New Edition of Prescriptions", and once personally introduced a friend to use it to treat children's hernias.

What Lu Xun criticizes is only those Chinese medicine practitioners who have low morality, bad work style, absurd prescriptions, and push ghosts and gods when treatment is ineffective, and Lu Xun's ruthless exposure and criticism of these backward and superstitious phenomena should be beyond reproach. In "Father's Disease" mentioned in the "so-and-so famous doctor" "the outpatient clinic turned out to be one dollar and four corners, special pull ten yuan, doubled late at night, doubled out of the city and doubled", and when going out, you must take a car, you must smoke and drink when you enter the door, you must be respectful, and you must be respectful, and you have a deep taste of "asking for a doctor as if you worship"; the drugs used, such as reed root in winter, sugar cane that has been frosted for three years, the flat wood of the knot, and the old drum skin that is broken, how much can these play a role in edema disease? Crickets are used as drugs, so why "original"? What does the original match have to do with the treatment? And even more, there is also the appendix of "the healer, the will", and the superstitious concept of "the doctor can cure the disease, but not the life". You must know that at that time, 2 oceans were a month's expense for ordinary people's families, and Lu Xun, as the eldest son of a depressed family, had been in and out of the quality shop and the pharmacy because of his father's illness for more than four years, and he used to go in and out of the quality shop and the pharmacy almost every day... From sending clothes or hand ornaments outside the counter that is twice as high, receiving money in insults, to buying medicine for my long-ill father at the same height counter... However, my father finally died day by day. Not only was he embarrassed, but his family also fell from "well-off" to "trapped". These painful memories and heavy burdens once left an indelible impression on the heart of the young Lu Xun, so there was some criticism of the unreasonableness of Traditional Chinese Medicine later. Is it quite the current "medical trouble" style? It's just that now "medical trouble" uses "smashing and smashing", the weapon used is a knife, and Lu Xun uses a pen

In his diary, Lu Xun repeatedly wrote about the experience of taking traditional Chinese medicine. On November 10, 1912, "drinking ginger juice to cure stomach pain was a small healing." On November 23 of the same year, "abdominal pain in the afternoon, make ginger juice to serve." On April 22, 1916, "I drank wujiapi wine in the evening because of shoulder pain". In the eight-day diary from August 30 to September 6, 1930, it was written four times that he went to Renjitang to buy Chinese medicine for his son Zhou Haiying. And Lu Xun also read and collected and personally repaired Chinese medicine books, and recorded this in the "Lu Xun Diary": on September 12, 1914, he "bought two volumes of "Preparing for Emergency Moxibustion With Acupuncture and Moxibustion Selection Day", on February 21, 1915, he "bought four copies of The Jing Song "Wang Shu and the Pulse Sutra", on February 26 of the same year, he "bought a ten-volume book of "The Origin of Theories of the Diseases of the Chao Family", on April 27, he "bought two copies of the "Copper Man Acupuncture Acupuncture Chart Classic", and on August 2, 1927, he bought the "Book of Liu Li Zhai Medicine" One twenty-two books". Lu Xun not only personally went to the bookstore to buy Chinese medicine books, but also repaired Chinese medicine books by himself. The diary dated August 12, 1927 reads: "Repair the Book of Medicine in the Afternoon. On August 17, "the afternoon repair of the "Book of Medicine of the Six Li Zhai". Just think, if Mr. Lu Xun had a prejudiced vision of traditional Chinese medicine, would he still have purchased and studied these medical classics of the motherland for such a long time? If the collection of ancient Chinese medicine books is for creative needs, then the hands-on repair of ancient Chinese medicine books is an affirmation of Chinese medicine.

According to Mr. Lu Xun's son Zhou Haiying in his memoirs "Extraordinary Study: Lu Xun and Me for Seventy Years", "Someone once wrote an article saying that Lu Xun was opposed to Chinese medicine, and Lu Xun and Zhou Haiying did not believe in Chinese medicine. This does not seem to be the case. He also cited the example of his mother Xu Guangping taking black chicken white phoenix pills at that time: "My mother was overworked at that time, and there were many vaginal discharges, and Western medicine let her use the flushing method, which did not work." She then bought the 'Black Chicken White Phoenix Pill' and took it, and the effect was very fast, and even Western medicine was surprised. This kind of Chinese medicine pill, later introduced to Xiao Hong by her parents, because she was also weak and tired, and her life was unstable, so that she suffered from women's menstrual irregularities, and the results were also cured. ”

Although Lu Xun is a fierce anti-traditionalist, he is not a total anti-traditionalist, not a cultural nihilist, and Lu Xun opposes the negativity of traditional culture. Even in the era of criticizing Chinese medicine, Lu Xun still read the books of Chinese medicine, used the methods of Chinese medicine, and felt the effects of Chinese medicine. It can be seen that Lu Xun did not completely deny Chinese medicine, but only attacked the dross in it. With the growth of age and the enrichment of experience, he can understand things more comprehensively and deeply, and thus also see the true value and contribution of Chinese medicine, Lu Xun's attitude towards Chinese medicine has probably changed.