Customer Reviews

Chinese Acupuncture (Paradigm title)

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I agree with the other reviews of this book - it is outstanding. One feature which should not be overlooked is that work was written in the 30s, and pre-dates the Maoist revisions of 'TCM' - there is still not a whole lot of material on the 'spiritual' aspects of points, etc., which many say were weeded out during the revisions, but it is still the most thorough textbook available on Chinese Medicine which is not largely shaped by the homogenizing efforts of the Cultural Revolution.

An outstanding description of both the theory and the practice of Acupuncture. There are not many point locations charts and few from the French edition are reproduced. But the quality and the quantity of the text that describes those points makes up for the loss. If I could have only one book on Acupuncture, this one would be it.

This is a very interesting book clinically and historically. Soulie de Morant was an accomplished scholar, and obviously studied Chinese medicine in depth, including classical texts. He often quotes Yang Ji Zhou's "Zhen Jiu Da Cheng" as well as the "Yi Xue Ru Men". Some practitioners, notably Dr. Andrew Tseng, previously the district physician of Shanghai, spoke of Yang Ji Zhou as the pinnacle of acupuncture, and so it is of great value to have so many quotes from this under appreciated classic. Historically this book offers a wonderful opportunity to look into Chinese medicine in the fairly recent past significantly before modern communist standardization of the medicine. Soulie de Morant lived in China from 1901-1917. He practiced and promoted Chinese medicine for the rest of his life in France. Definitely a book worth exploring for practitioners.

The best, or one of the best. The only thing I can say against it is that the point location pictures are scarse and not very good (most of the pictures from the old original French edition did not make it here). The amount of valuable info given can be equalled by its quality. The author was an extraordinary man and he put his soul in this work. If you are serious, this book is a-must to have.

My medical training includes TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), Homeopathy and Pharmacy based medicine.
There are many diferent modalities of acupuncture in the world as well as subtypes of the main systems. Terminology can be very confusing in this field according to the author or location. Some reviewers may have limited views and we should discard bias comments because the world of medicine is not black and white. This is an outstanding work on acupuncture, written truly by a great man.

I was very excited about this book when I encountered it as an acupuncture student, mainly because of the psychological indications given for the points, and because I had not found such interesting psychological info before in English.

However, subsequent learnings have dampened my enthusiasm:

1. This book uses terms and theories not found elsewhere in representations of authentic historical Chinese medicine.

2. This book, originally written in 1931, is blamed for the mistranslation of jing-luo as "meridians" and qi as "energy," and the closed-minded aberrance of French acupuncture. What I have heard, but have not been able to verify, is that this book left so many gaps in Chinese medicine that the French were forced to make up their own theories, and now they hold onto them even when they contradict newer more accurate translations of Chinese medical classics.

3. There is more and more historical psychological information available for acupuncturists and we needn't rely on this book alone for that. In fact, this book gives only indications for points without discussing the vessel-related reasons why those points work that way. For more on this, see books by Sionneau or Deadman.