333 Prescriptions for Virtuosity • Eric Karchmer

We practice traditional medicine, or do we?

Because Chinese medicine has roots and writings that go back into misty history, it’s easy to imagine we practice much like your average Qing or Ming doctor. But the truth is, the way practitioners worked even just a hundred years ago would be quite foreign to the standards of today.

In this conversation with Eric Karchmer we explore some of the themes and historic insights from his new book Prescriptions for Virtuosity, The Post Colonial Struggle of Chinese Medicine.

I’m serious when I tell you— it’s going to blow your mind.

Listen into this discussion of how Chinese medicine became the slow medicine, the brilliant innovation of the early textbooks, and how it is that what you think is the ancient bones of our medicine, is in many ways a new innovation. One wrought not through the communists stripping out the shamanistic practices, but rather by Chinese doctors themselves figuring where they stood in relation to the potency and power of modern biomedicine as it changed the landscape of economics, power and practice.