In 1830, at the age of 62, Wang Qingren, a famous physician in the capital, felt that his days were numbered and had the courage to write a book on his life’s experience in the practice of medicine, which was published shortly after Wang’s death.
Before his death, he had foreseen the risk to his reputation brought by this book, so he said in the preface: “When there are inaccuracies and incompletenesses in it, it will be fortunate if future generations have the opportunity to see them from the bottom of their hearts and to examine and add to them. This medical book, which seems so commonplace today, was a shock to the world at the time, as Wang Qingren himself had expected, and sparked a huge controversy, with peer reviews galore. At that time, Xinglin in the capital blamed “Medical Forest Correction of Errors” for making more and more errors, adding errors to errors, and even poisoning it. He was scolded as “not measuring himself,” “unkind,” and “a madman.
So what exactly did Wang Qingren say?
In fact, it is very simple, in his book for the first time questioned the TCM lungs and internal organs, but added dozens of his own drawings “personally corrected internal organs map”.
We all know that traditional Chinese medicine is trapped in rituals and rituals, the dead are big, never learned anatomy, and the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, which is the guiding principle, is also incomplete and full of errors and omissions. They are all about qi and blood, meridians, cold and heat, yin and deficiency, and other inexplicable general terms. Most ancient TCM practitioners had no idea what organs the human body had, where they were, or what their functions were.
In his practice, he found that the descriptions of human organs in various ancient medical books were contradictory and mysterious, and none of them were based on actual observation or anatomy. He lamented: “If you don’t know about internal organs in books, you’re dreaming, and if you don’t know about internal organs, it’s like walking in the night with a blind man. He began his research early on by observing the structure of the human body.
At the age of 30, Wang was practicing medicine in Luanzhou, Hebei province, during a plague epidemic that was killing children, leaving them in mass graves, bitten by wild dogs, and exposing their internal organs. He went to observe the bodies for ten days and found discrepancies in the pictures of the organs depicted in the ancient books. After that, he made many trips to the execution ground in Fengtian and Beijing to secretly observe the corpses and their internal organs and to learn the structure of human organs from the executioners. He was also the first herbalist to dissect livestock.
It was also from Wang that he gained the knowledge that the brain is the organ and core center of the human mind.
It was with the accumulation of these practices that he felt that the ancient medical books were misleading, and he specially hand-drew the “I See Corrected Visceral Figure”, which illustrated the shape and position of human internal organs. However, his peers at that time considered this kind of scientific evidence as treason and insulted Xinglin, attacking him for “teaching people the way of medicine in rotten bones and on the killing field,” which made him unable to stay in the profession. Only before his death did he dare to write about his 42 years of medical practice in his book “The Correction of Errors in Medical Practice”.
It was not easy to discover common sense in closed China at that time, nor was it easy in the West, where science was already flourishing. Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician contemporary of Wang Qingren, gave his life for such common sense as washing hands before surgery.
In the mid-19th century, before the development of bacteriology, Western medicine believed that diseases were spread through a toxic mist, in which harmful particles called ‘miasmas’ were locked inside. As a result, hospitals were generally unsanitary, if not downright deplorable. Doctors rarely wash their hands or clean medical equipment, and operating rooms are essentially as filthy as slaughterhouses.
Because of the high death rate from post-operative infections, the hospital was also known as the “DeathHouse”.
Semmelweis began his career in the obstetrics and gynecology department of the Vienna General Hospital. At that time, women were prone to so-called “puerperal fever” (actually a bacterial infection) after childbirth, which had a high mortality rate and was always considered incurable. During his work, he noticed that there was a big difference in the maternal mortality rate between labor and delivery rooms managed by male doctors and those managed by female midwives. His meticulous statistics showed that in 1847, for every 1,000 births, male doctors were responsible for 98.4 deaths, while female midwives were responsible for only 36.2 deaths. This discrepancy had been thought to be due to the “rough handling” of patients by male doctors.
However, Semmelweis, after carefully studying the delivery procedures of both male and female doctors, found that male doctors tend to perform one surgery after another without washing their hands at all, while female midwives are neat and tidy and usually wash their hands.
To confirm his suspicions, Semmelweis added a lime chloride antiseptic solution to the obstetrics department and required doctors to wash their hands before each delivery. As a result of this procedure, by 1848, the mortality rate per 1,000 deliveries plummeted to 12.7 for both men and women in the delivery room. This small hand-washing procedure saved the lives of countless mothers.
Although the results speak for themselves, Semmelweis was fired from the hospital! This is because, in the hospital’s view, the need for doctors to wash their hands and disinfect them is an indirect reference to the hospital’s responsibility for the high maternal mortality rate, which is the same as exposing oneself and taking the blame.
The unemployed Semmelweis was forced to return to his native Hungary. In a small hospital in Budapest, he worked as an honorary doctor in the maternity ward on an unpaid basis. In 1861, Semmelweis published the results of his research on puerperal fever in the form of an observational report, but because no one knew about bacteriology, he was forced to return to his native Hungary, where he solved the rampant problem of “puerperal fever” in the same way.
In 1861, Semmelweis published the results of his research on puerperal fever in the form of an observational report. However, because neither bacteriology nor the nature of cross-infection was known, Semmelweis was unable to provide theoretical support for his findings. So his fellow physicians, who had become accustomed to not washing their hands, thought that he was making a spectacle of himself and was deliberately insulting his peers, and tried to marginalize him. In the heat of the moment, the lonely Cemalvez was treated like a lunatic and committed to an insane asylum in 1865.
A desperate and desperate Smailovis tried to escape, but was beaten by the guards and died of a severe infection from his wounds at the age of 47. It was not until more than a decade after his death, when bacteriology was developed, that the medical community slowly came to accept his findings, and hand washing with antiseptics became common practice in the maternity ward until the 1880s.
In the decades following Wang’s death, his book, The Correction of Errors in Medical Practice, became the first Chinese medical book to be translated into Europe, and was reprinted in China. Although his knowledge was still flawed, he was recognized by the Concise British Encyclopedia as the most influential Chinese physician of modern China. Liang Qichao also praised Wang Qingren as “an extremely bold revolution in Chinese medicine,” while Semmelweis received belated recognition behind him, with his book The Pathogenesis, Substance, and Prevention of Puerperal Fever being hailed as “one of the most convincing and revolutionary works in the history of science! “On March 20, 2020, the home page of Google will pay tribute to him with an animation of the standard steps of hand-washing.
Common knowledge about the structure of the human body and hand-washing and germ prevention seems to be common knowledge today, but only a hundred years ago, even with the empirical evidence presented by the pioneers, it was still so difficult to be understood and accepted by the general public and even the professional elite that they had to pay a painful price for it.
Readers of my article today are actually reading some common sense. Many people may not have known it before, and even if they know it now, they may not accept it (e.g., the views on Chinese medicine). So you can see how difficult it is to accept common knowledge in an environment where knowledge structures and logical thinking are stereotyped. It may not be so rock-bottom, but the solidified brain will still reject it.
But even so, we must still strive to be people who chase common sense. If we don’t have that kind of situation, at least we should be able to understand and tolerate Wang Qingren and Semmelweis who may appear around us. This is where the real hope of a country and a nation lies.
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