Networks and Innovations: the Persistence of British Acupuncture, 1828–90

Abstract

In 1823, James Morss Churchill pledged to bring his medical audience an ‘appendix’ on acupuncture, presenting a collection of cases in which the needles had been successfully deployed. Five years later the book, Cases Illustrative of the Immediate Effects of Acupuncturation, in Rheumatism, Lumbago, Sciatica, Anomalous Muscular Diseases, And in Dropsy of the Cellular Tissue; Selected from various sources, and intended as an Appendix to the Author’s Treatise on the Subject, finally appeared. As promised, a series of thirty case studies formed the bulk of the text. They depict the everyday use of acupuncture by eleven British medical men, both surgeons and physicians, between 1821 and 1827. Churchill clearly intended the book to be a manual for would-be acupuncture users as well as a repository of evidence supporting the technique. Consequently, the cases were richly detailed, describing the symptoms of each patient and the exact manner in which the needles were placed, inserted and removed. In these minutiae, the voices of the individual practitioners, and occasionally even those of the healed patients, can be heard, making it possible to reconstruct much of the process by which acupuncture diffused through Great Britain, geographically and socially.

… it is for the doubting and hesitating, to impeach the veracity, or prove the credulity of the many, who have produced, witnessed, or felt the truly beneficial effects of acupuncturation.¹

Churchill, 1828