Classical Chinese Medicine and the Needham Question

This chapter recognises the distinction between treating the Needham Question as a comparative issue on the one hand and as a dialogical issue on the other. However, it wishes to argue that the two are interconnected. A plausible case could be made that Needham’s own understanding of the former may have limitations which undermine that of the latter. Hence a considerable amount of attention must be paid to the comparative issue, not for its own sake but from the necessity demanded by this interpretative standpoint. Chinese medicine has been chosen for some detailed exploration as Needham had not done sufficient justice to it from the methodological vantage point. In modern Western medicine, Needham had also ignored epidemiology, focusing on clinical medicine. In turn, such oversight (implicitly) led Needham to misrepresent Chinese philosophy-cosmology as well as ironically to go down the road of Coloniality in spite of his overt “scientific oecumenism”.