BERLIN
— One day in 1971, the doorbell rang at Paul U. Unschuld’s apartment in
Munich. He opened the door to find a young man, who laconically said in
English: “Hi, I am James Quinn, C.I.A. Tell me about the military usage
of acupuncture.”
So
began the German academic’s rise from relative obscurity to his
position as the West’s leading authority on ancient Chinese healing
practices. One of the first Western scholars to tackle Chinese medicine
in a systematic and serious way, Dr. Unschuld has seen his subject more
as a way to interpret Chinese civilization than as a New Age answer to
modern medicine.
Respected
and sometimes resented for his scrupulousness in translating Chinese
medical texts, Dr. Unschuld, a tall man of regal bearing, harks back to
an era of scholarship, when people who engaged with China were called Sinologists — those who studied broad swaths of the Chinese world that reflected their wide-ranging interests.
For
Dr. Unschuld, that has included amassing a collection of statues of
medical deities that is planned to be a centerpiece of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, a new museum under construction that will showcase non-European cultures.
Dr.
Unschuld has also collected 1,100 antique manuscripts that could give
clues to how medicine was practiced at China’s grass-roots level. The
manuscripts contain more than 40,000 prescriptions that are being
examined for promising ingredients, with some of the remedies for epilepsy already being studied by a Chinese-German start-up.
In
his spare time, Dr. Unschuld has led German government delegations to
China, and has written books on how medicine helps to explain China’s
rise to global prominence.
“If
there are two words I’d associate with Unschuld, it’s rigor and
exactitude,” said Phil Garrison, a teacher at the Pacific College of
Oriental Medicine in San Diego and at the Finger Lakes School of
Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in Seneca Falls, N.Y. “But these
qualities are a double-edged sword.”
That
is because Dr. Unschuld, who is as blunt as he is outspoken, stands at
the center of a long and contentious debate in the West over Chinese
medicine. For many, it is the ur-alternative to what they see as the
industrialized and chemicalized medicine that dominates in the West. For
others, it is little more than charlatanism, with its successes
attributed to the placebo effect and the odd folk remedy.
Dr.
Unschuld is a challenge to both ways of thinking. He has just finished a
28-year English translation of the three principal parts of the
foundational work of Chinese medicine: the Huangdi Neijing, or Yellow
Emperor’s Inner Classic, published by the University of California Press.
But unlike many of the textbooks used in Chinese medicine schools in
the West, Dr. Unschuld’s works are monuments to the art of serious
translation; he avoids New Age jargon like “energy” or familiar Western
medical terms like “pathogens,” seeing both as unfair to the ancient
writers and their worldviews.
But
this reflects a deep respect for the ancient authors the detractors of
Chinese medicine sometimes lack. Dr. Unschuld hunts down obscure terms
and devises consistent terminologies that are sometimes not easy to
read, but are faithful to the original text. Almost universally, his
translations are regarded as trailblazing — making available, for the
first time in a Western language, the complete foundational works of
Chinese medicine from up to 2,000 years ago.
“There
exist any number of critical editions of the works of Hippocrates or
Galen” from ancient Greece, said Don Harper, a professor at the
University of Chicago, who studies ancient Chinese religious and medical
texts. “Paul is the first to provide anything comparable to the Chinese
corpus.”
But
for many Western practitioners of Chinese medicine, Dr. Unschuld is an
uncompromising guide to the Chinese classics. His books sell well, but
many Westerners prefer more accessible translations that use more
familiar terms.
“People
were very threatened by what he said,” said Z’ev Rosenberg, an author,
and a practitioner and teacher of Chinese medicine. “He said you need
access to the sources and the terminology.”
And
then there is the issue of efficacy. With his extremely dry humor, Dr.
Unschuld likens Chinese medicine to the herbal formulas of the medieval
Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen.
If people want to try it, they should be free to do so, he said, but
not at taxpayer expense. As for himself, Dr. Unschuld says he has never
tried Chinese medicine.
At his office in Berlin’s famous Charité hospital
— where many pioneers of modern medicine got their start — Dr. Unschuld
told a story about how, several years ago, he suffered a bilateral lung
embolism. Pointing out the window to the hospital’s main tower, he said
he was saved by modern medicine.
“Excuse
me, but acupuncture and herbs can’t help you there,” he said, with a
laugh. “But there are some health problems where these therapies may be
beneficial, and, hence, I’m not against it when someone uses it.”
At
times, Dr. Unschuld almost seems perplexed that his field of study
actually became an alternative source of medical treatment. He said
Chinese medicine’s popularity in the West can trace its roots to the
Cold War, to 1971 to be exact. That is when James Reston, a columnist
for The New York Times, reported about how he was treated in China for a burst appendix, in part with acupuncture and mugwort.
This
was during the Kissinger-Nixon rapprochement with China, and the start
of China’s decades-long reopening to the outside world. Chinese medicine
became part of the country’s allure. Soon came the visit to Dr.
Unschuld from Mr. Quinn, the C.I.A. agent; the opening of Chinese medical schools in the West; and a flood of books and translations about the exotic-sounding healing arts from the Orient.
Dr.
Unschuld’s interest in medicine was not entirely unique in his family.
His great-grandfather had treated the king of Belgium and other European
nobility. Dr. Unschuld says he grew up in a household filled with vases
and other chinoiserie donated by grateful patients. His father had been
a pharmacist who collected pharmaceutical artifacts and pharmacopoeias
of past centuries.
Initially,
Dr. Unschuld earned a degree in pharmacy in Munich along with his wife,
Ulrike. But he had also been fascinated with foreign languages and had
completed a parallel track in Chinese studies. In 1969, before what he
assumed would be a career in the pharmaceutical industry, the couple
went to Taiwan for a year to improve their Chinese language skills.
Instead,
Dr. Unschuld spent the year interviewing medical practitioners. The
resulting Ph.D. thesis started his career as an expert on Chinese
medicine, and for 20 years he headed the Institute for the History of Medicine at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University.
His
purely academic approach, however, makes him a difficult figure for
China to embrace. While widely respected for his knowledge and
translations, he has done little to advance the government’s agenda of
promoting Chinese medicine as soft power. Echoing other critics, he
describes China’s translations of the classics as “complete swindles,”
saying they are done with little care and only a political goal in mind.
For Dr. Unschuld, Chinese medicine is far more interesting as an allegory for China’s mental state. His most famous book
is a history of Chinese medical ideas, in which he sees classic
figures, such as the Yellow Emperor, as a reflection of the Chinese
people’s deep-seated pragmatism. At a time when demons and ghosts were
blamed for illness, these Chinese works from 2,000 years ago ascribed it
to behavior or disease that could be corrected or cured.
“It is a metaphor for enlightenment,” he says.
Especially
striking, Dr. Unschuld says, is that the Chinese approach puts
responsibility on the individual, as reflected in the statement “wo ming
zai wo, bu zai tian” — “my fate lies with me, not with
heaven.” This mentality was reflected on a national level in the 19th
and 20th centuries, when China was being attacked by outsiders. The
Chinese largely blamed themselves and sought concrete answers by
studying foreign ideas, industrializing and building a modern economy.
In
China, Dr. Unschuld said, “Medicine and politics are similar: You don’t
blame others, you blame yourself.” He added, “You ask: ‘What did I do
wrong? What made me vulnerable? What can I do against it?’ This is why
China has risen.”
