Promotor of Chinese Medicine in the West

George Soulie de Morant

The putative successful western medicine today was due to the fact that it became more or less a pure causal-analytic science from the midth of the 19th century on. Chinese medicine seems not integratable in this scheme, approaches from each sides doomed to failure in lack of common terminology and will of understanding in languages. As a result there were flurries of primitive acupuncture experimentation by physicians in France, England, Germany, Italy, Sweden in the first three decades of the 19th century, which did not renew itself in Europe until a century later.

George Soulie de Morant (1879 - 1955) had the most impact on the development of the twentieth-century European acupuncture. He studied acupuncture with the most noted chinese practicioners of the time, and was considered a doctor of Chinese medicine by the Chinese themselves.

Born in Paris 1879 he learned from childhood the chinese language (mandarin) and in intending to study medicine he took a bank job first. But his employer, taking advantage of his excellent almost native spoken chinese, sent him to China in the turn to the 20th century. Fortunately his appreciation of Chinese Culture and his rapid adaption to the Chinese society led to a new engagement by the French Ministry of foreign affairs. He was appointed French Consul for Shanghai and sent to Yunnan.

In that post he wittnessed in one of the very common cholera epidemics in those times that chinese practitioners with acupuncture were more successful than their western trained colleagues. That was the turning point in his life, acupuncture became his central life interest. In the time of the end of the chinese empire (1901 - 1911) he studied directly under the two most noted chinese physicians in these days, Yang and Chang, in Peking and Shanghai.

Additionally he wrote more than sixty books and articles about almost every aspects of Chinese life - from a biography of the last empress over Chinese art, to Chinese music history and literature. Eventually he received the highest civilian award for his achievements, a very rare distinction in China for a foreigner then, in 1913, and now.

George Soulie de Morant returned to France 1917 and began promoting acupuncture among the medical profession. According to inaccurate information he was confronted with skepticism and derision and his first attempts failed basically due to the fact that most translations of the Chinese acupuncture literature and medical texts were bad, in contradiction or simply unavailable. So he decided to publish his own articles and essays based on his translations of the original Chinese sources.

George Soulie de Morant taught clinical applications of acupuncture to French physicians, and began systematically introducing the acupuncture theory of the classical texts to the European medical community. Terms as "QI", "Jing", "Meridian", "MU" and many other nowadays commonly used terms which originated in his texts are translations for the fundamental tenets of acupuncture: anatomy, physiology and pathology.

But it lasted until 1931 when two main french physicians (Dr Flandin and Dr Martiny) noticed his genius after an article in a medical paper. They invited him to work with them in their hospitals. Unfortunately no remarkable records of their studies and surveys have survived but he eventually published as a result of this work his first book on acupuncture in Europe (Summary of the true acupuncture). In 1939 the first of three volumes of his famous work L'Acuponcture Chinoise (Chinese Acupuncture) was published. This book was the final impact of the development in France and Western Europe and was the basis for the author's nomination for the Nobel prize in 1950.

But although Europe has thus served the main influence for acupuncture approaches from George Soulie de Morant that integrates practice of conventional Western medicine and traditional Chinese medicine he suffered hostility from the first day on. He was confrontated with the fact that he had no western medical training background, therefore he must be unable to interpret the medical significance of traditional Chinese concepts in the texts that he had read. They argued that a firm basis of medical knowledge must be necessary for the reliable practise of acupuncture, thus not unwittingly introducing acupuncture as a playground for lay therapists.

Affected by these discussions and arguements, additionially accused by his Chinese friends to "westernize" acupuncture his health deteriorated. George Soulie de Morant suffered a stroke in 1950 which left him partially paralized. But he learned to write with his other hand and finished his life work with volume three in 1955. Just after completing L'Acuponcture Chinoise he died of a heart attack.

Pointing on missing scientific precision in his book, the lack of formal translational methodologies and philological details oversees the fact that those "western" goals was not the aim of de Morant in the first place. He wanted to achieve acceptance for acupuncture among the European physicians. He introduced acupuncture systematically to the West and therefore it was only him who did the first giant step to the art and science of european acupuncture, all others followed.

Since his death millions of patients have been treated the way practitioners have advised through his through his monumental books.
This and the precision in his records, his talent of observation and not at least his biography bridged the cleft between Western and Chinese medicine. And this alone makes him one of the most remarkable and most respectable physicians and scientists we had in the last century.

(c) Copyright 2001 by D Blumberg

References:
Hempen C (1999)    dtv - Atlas Akupunktur,  Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, München

Gwei-djen L, Needham J (1980)   Celestial Lancets, A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa,   Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Unschuld P (1985) Medicine in China: A history of ideas, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Bertschinger R trans. (1991). The Golden Needle and Other Odes of Traditional Acupuncture, Boulder.

Soulie de Morant G, trans. (1994) Chinese Acupuncture. Brookline, MA: Paradigm.
Werner D, et al (1992) Where There Is No Doctor. Hesperian Foundation