CHINESE IGNORANCE OF ANATOMY

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1676, 13 April 1904, Page 66

CHINESE IGNORANCE OF ANATOMY

No Chinese representative of the healing art has ever dissecte dairy portion of the human frame. Accordingly their ideas of anatomy and physiology are matters of faith confirmed by images which have been reproduced during untold centuries. Their osteology teiaches that the skull is formed of one bone; so is the pelvis; the number of ribs vary with the individual, and at the junction of the arm with the forearm is placed a cubital patella. According to Chinese splanchology, the small intestine communicates with the cavity of the neart. while the colon, after describing sixteen circumvolutions, terminates by opening into the lung. Tire heart governs the vital processes—an co-operation with the cavity of the stomach io supplies all ideas and all pleasurable sensations. The liver is the habitat of the soul, and it is'from this gland that all noble and generous sentiments emanate.

The gall bladder is the receptacle of courage; its ascent in the body is the cause of a fit of anger. They have an i-u-ea of the continuous motion of the blood, but it seems to be the product of an imagination more riotously oriental than even that which created the other items of their physiologic knowledge. They do not know the pulmonary circulation; they, naturally, know nothing of the valves in the veins; they do not even appear to have quite grasped the motor function of the heart itself, but they, nevertheless, profess to differentiate no less than sevemeyi'our vaiaeties of pulse—simultaneously recognisable on the person of a single individual! In its ultimate structure the b-ody is composed of live elements: Five, water, earth, wood and metal. Each ox these elements is in a harmonious rapport with the corresponding members of the series of five planets, live metals, five solid viscera,, five colours and five tastes. All diseases originate from disturbances of the primary and essential quincic harmonies of those coi relations.