In the Footsteps of the Yellow Emperor

by Peter Eckman, MD

  Figure 111: CHRISTOPH WILHELM HUFELAND (1762—1836)

  the German physician of the vitalist school who coined the term Macrobiotics.

  Figure 112: SAMUEL HAHNEMANN (1775—1843), the German

  physician who founded homeopathy in response to what he perceived as the inadequacies of conventional medicine, an approach which he called allopathy.

  Thus, by tapping into the vitalistic traditions of both the East and the West, George Ohsawa taught an approach to medicine that had as many adherents in one of these worlds as in the other, and it is not so surprising that many of his ideas parallel those of Worsley. I will return to Ohsawa in another context at the end of this story, but for now I’d like to describe my search for a substantive basis for the common ideas of these two charismatic teachers, a task which was nowhere near as easy as I had hoped it might be.

  I made extensive studies to see if Worsley had ever had any contact with Ohsawa, who died in 1966, which would explain the similarity of their teachings, but met with negative results from every source including Ohsawa’s American biographer, Ron Kotzsch, his most serious archivist, Dr. Marc Van Cauwenbergh, and many of the leaders of the macrobiotic movement in the U.S. and abroad (including Clim Yoshimi, Jacques de Langre, Shizuko Yamamoto, William Dufty, Bill Tara and Michio Kushi). Two macrobiotic students from Worsley’s second American class (1973) (Michael Rosoff and Robert Gerzon) both reported that Professor Worsley was at that time actively hostile to the idea of macrobiotics, and I can confirm that from my own Licentate class, where Worsley described his insistence that a prospective macrobiotic patient eat a hamburger before he would agree to treat him. Worsley did, however, lecture in the early 70’s in Boston, under Michio Kushi’s sponsorship (see Fig.114 for a momento of that visit) and Kushi was responsible for encouraging his students to study with Worsley. Kushi (Fig.115) himself, later (1973) wrote about acupuncture and lectured in London under the auspices of the BAA and Sidney Rose-Neil, but his teachings bear no resemblance to the excerpts I quoted from Ohsawa, nor did the teachings of the only other Japanese macrobiotic acupuncturist of prominence living in the West, Noborou Muramoto (Fig.116) who wrote the popular text Healing Ourselves. Under Kushi’s guidance, an English translation of Ohsawa’s acupuncture teachings was produced,(269) but it is more of a ghost-written work than a translation, and bears no resemblance to Worsley’s teachings, so Kushi can be eliminated as an explanation of the Worsley/Ohsawa link. The best connection between these two which I have managed to discover consists of several rather tenuous links. The first is via Denis Lawson-Wood (1906–1990) who studied with Ohsawa in England between 1960 and 1962, and who was a colleague of Worsley from 1962 on, however very little of Lawson-Wood’s published material, which is voluminous, mentions either the focus on the Spirit or the technical material quoted from Acupuncture and the Medicine of the Far East which is so reminiscent of LA. This latter publication wasn’t even done until 1969 (although it dealt with events in 1958) by which time Lawson-Wood had stopped studying with Ohsawa and also stopped close contact with Worsley (who had started his own school in 1966). The second, more promising but still indirect link turns out to be one of the candidates for the role of the mysterious German doctor who was actually present at the class in 1958 on which Ohsawa’s book was based.(270) His identity was only revealed at the tail-end of my attempts to follow the two leads given in Ohsawa’s book, and so he shall remain anonymous a while longer. The first lead was Ohsawa’s mention of a collaboration with Soulié de Morant (Fig.117) in 1934, co-translating a Japanese work by T. Nakayama, “Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Verified in Japan.” In this endeavor, Ohsawa did the bulk of the translation, and Soulié de Morant handled the technical terms, so it would appear that Ohsawa’s knowledge of acupuncture was still elementary in 1934. In the late 1950’s text he mentions that the clinical material was contributed by Mme. Hashimoto (Fig.118), a Japanese practitioner who co-presented a series of classes with Ohsawa in Europe in 1958, on which experience his treatise was based (Fig.119 and 120).

  Figure 113: CONSTANTINE HERING

  (1800—1880), the German-American disciple of Hahnemann who originated the “Law of Cure.”

  Figure 114: INTERVIEW WITH JACK WORSLEY

  in “The East West Journal,” June 30, 1972, conducted in Boston, where he was teaching a seminar.

  So now we have two leads to follow: Soulié de Morant and Hashimoto. Each will take us down a separate but fruitful path. Let’s start with Soulie de Morant, as he was chronologically prior. I think we can say that contemporary traditional acupuncture in the West, whatever that is, started with George Soulié de Morant, (1878 -1955) in 1927 in France. Prior to that date, there had been scattered accounts and even some books about acupuncture in Western languages, but no attempt to formulate a systematic energetic understanding of acupuncture based on Points, Meridians, the circulation of Qi and its management and reflection in pulse diagnosis had ever been attempted.

  Figure 115: MICHIO KUSHI AND HIS WIFE AVELINE

  Kushi came to the United States in 1949 as Ohsawa’s emissary under the sponsorhip of Norman Cousins. He has been the most vocal proponent of Macrobiotics since Ohsawa’s death.

  Figure 116: NOBORU MURAMOTO,

  author of the popular Macrobiotics text Healing Ourselves. He taught acupuncture to students in California in the mid-1970’s.

  Soulié de Morant(271) grew up in an unusual family that encouraged him to learn Chinese from the tender age of eight. He was originally schooled by the Jesuits, and like many of the people I will mention in this chapter, intended to study medicine, but had to give up that ambition when his father died. At 21, based on his linguistic skills, he got a secretarial job in China, and happened to be in Peking during a cholera epidemic, which is an acute illness with a high mortality (usually 30 to 50%). Soulié de Morant made the acquaintance of a Dr. Yang, who was extraordinarily successful in treating cholera victims with acupuncture (using more or less a formula treatment: S25, S36, LI10 and Points around CV8) and Soulié de Morant’s curiosity was piqued, to the point that he began studying with Dr. Yang, who even let him do some of these treatments under his guidance.

  As an aside, it is of interest that the treatment of cholera and other epidemics which I have already mentioned in connection with Hufeland’s reputation in Japan, was also a field in which homeopathy made notable advances, a parallel history to which I would like to return later. Homeopathic camphor was actually considered to be a specific treatment for cholera by Hahnemann, who discovered this connection.

  Figure 117: GEORGE SOULIÉ DE MORANT

  (1878—1955), the “Grandfather” of traditional acupuncture in the West, he was a prolific author, publishing over twenty books and articles about acupuncture. The publication of his magnum opus, Chinese Acupuncture , led to his nomination for the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1950, but the prize was ultimately won by scientists from Switzerland and America.

  Soulié de Morant was subsequently appointed to the French Consular Corps and sent to various cities in China, in each of which he sought out acupuncture teachers–a Dr. Zhang in Shanghai and several unnamed doctors in Yunnan being prominent. I should point out that Yunnan province is contiguous with Indochina, including Vietnam, and it is likely that the initial Vietnamese influence on French acupuncture is probably a consequence of Soulié de Morant’s studies in Yunnan. Soulié de Morant was unusual in that he adopted local custom as his own, and it was said that when he dressed up, his speech and manner were indistinguishable from a native Chinese, and so he earned the respect and trust of his teachers, who supplied him with the most precious texts and instruction. He became so proficient a practitioner, that in 1908 the Viceroy of Yunnan certified him as a “Master Physician-Acupuncturist” –quite an extraordinary honor (Fig.121).

  One other Oriental influence on Soulie de Morant came from Japan, where he spent a month in 1906 because of his own poor state of health, and is reflected in Soulie de Morant’s later ci
tation of Japanese works in his publications. Thus, we can see that from its very inception, the European acupuncture which Soulié de Morant inaugurated, reflected aspects of Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese tradition. In fact, Soulie de Morant also cited several classical Korean texts, so that tradition was represented, too. Soulié de Morant was an extraordinary individual, whose work encompassed many fields: art, literature, music, theater, linguistics and history, but there is no room here to discuss his accomplishments in those areas. However, let me just mention one curious historical incident that may have had a tremendous impact on world history: during his tenure as Vice-Consul in Yunnan in 1908, Soulié de Morant had occasion to help Sun Yat-Sen (Fig.122) by signing a visa for him which allowed this famous revolutionary father of modern China to escape from the imperial police who were trying to catch him.

  Soulié de Morant returned to France in 1918, but it was not until 1927 that his Western career in acupuncture really began. At that time, he brought his daughter for medical treatment to a naturopath who specialized in hydrotherapy–Dr. Paul Ferreyroles. Ferreyroles was a member of a study group of physicians investigating alternative, or what is today called “complementary” medicine (including Drs. Marcel and Therese Martiny and later Flandin, Bonnet-Lemaire and Khoubesserian) and they prevailed upon Soulie de Morant to abandon all his other interests, and translate the classical Chinese medical texts into French and train them in acupuncture treatment. This he did, while developing a clinical-experimental practice, first under medical supervision in several hospitals, and later in private practice where he treated among others, the famous literary figure, Antonin Artaud.(272) He also experimented on himself, needling different points to see their effects, and kept careful records which he used in his subsequent publications.

  Figure 118: HASHIMOTO MASAE

  (1899—1981) (center) teaching acupuncture in France in 1958.

  Figure 119: OHSAWA AND HASHIMOTO

  collaboratively teaching the use of Five Element theory in acupuncture, March 26, 1958.

  Figure 120: OHSAWA

  lecturing on acupuncture, with Honma’s Meridian chart in the background, 1958.

  Figure 121: SOULIE DE MORANT

  as a member of the French Consular Corps in Shanghai (he’s the tallest of the French).

  Figure 122: SUN YAT-SEN

  (1866—1925), a physician whose revolutionary activity helped lead to the foundation of the Republic of China and the downfall of the Qing dynasty.

  His first writing about acupuncture was an article in the French Homeopathic Journal in 1929, in collaboration with Ferreyroles, and his first serious book about acupuncture, Précis de la vrai acuponcture chinoise, was published in 1934. Altogether he wrote over 20 books and articles on acupuncture, his magnum opus being L’Acuponcture Chinoise, the first part of which appeared from 1939-41, but which was only published in its entirety posthumously in 1957, and has just been issued in English translation by Paradigm Press in 1994.

  Because Soulie de Morant was essentially the first in the field, he got to choose the terminology, and thus we have him to thank for such technical terms as Meridian, Antique Point, Source Point, Five Element Point, Reunion Point, Command Point, Tonification, Dispersion, Spleen-Pancreas function and Circulation-Sex function. His system of acupuncture therapy is beyond the scope of this presentation, but I would like to mention in the following list, some of his ideas which later appeared as components of LA:1) The goal of treatment is to have all the 12 pulses equal.(273)

  2) You must take the pulse before, during and after every treatment–it is the only basis for a science of energetic treatment.

  3) Start by tonifying the deficiency using the tonification point (thus based on Five Elements!) and add the source point if necessary. Only disperse later. “Isn’t it best to direct the Excess to a Deficient part?”(274) This presages the idea of using the Five Element cycles to “transfer” Qi.

  4) Use horary times to enhance the effect of treatments (though Soulié de Morant recommends tonifying in the subsequent two hour period).

  5) If treating the Meridians isn’t giving the expected effect on the pulse, then use points on GV and CV.

  6) The left hand pulses should be slightly stronger than the right hand pulses. “If the husband is weak and the wife is robust, there will be destruction. If the husband is robust and the wife is weak, there will be security.”(275)

  7) To treat Evil (Xie) Qi, use the Yu points (AEP’s) of each Zang organ (possibly referring to Aggressive Energy). (276)

  8) He specifically mentions the following “laws”: Mother-Son, Husband-Wife, Midday-Midnight, and treatment by Five Elements using the Command points on each Meridian, with the mandatory inclusion of the coupled Meridian of the same Element. (277) This is exactly how Prof. Worsley organized his chart (Fig.123)

  9) In the right hand third pulse position (circulation-sex) he identified the deep pulse as the sexual or genital pulse because its strength clearly varied before and after the menses. The middle level he called the circulation pulse.(278) He identified CV 15 as the Alarm (Mo) Point of sexuality.

  10) He claimed that effective needling is often hardly perceptible, citing the Japanese experience.

  11) He recognized a commonality of acupuncture and homeopathy–a concordance first pointed out by the German Wiehe in 1903, one of whose parents was a missionary in China, and may have been exposed to acupuncture (Fig.124).

  Having compiled this list, I should like to point out that in many significant ways, Soulié de Morant’s teachings also differed from LA:1) Although he employed Five Element principles, his energetic paradigm was Yin/Yang. Thus, he interpreted the Mother-Son law as applying primarily to the superficial sequential circulation of the 12 Meridians as opposed to the deep circulation of the Five Elements. His idea was to balance Yin and Yang by the effect of treating any Meridian on its husband or wife, mother or son, midday-midnight associated and coupled Meridians. Tonifying any Meridian, e.g.,would tonify these other Meridians if they were of the same Yin/Yang polarity, but disperse them if they were of opposite polarity.

  2) He was quite interested in Western scientific correlations and explanations for traditional acupuncture, and e.g. cited Arndt’s Law that “weak stimulation tonifies, strong stimulation disperses” to understand needle techniques, although he believed that local and distal points had inverse effects. He advocated using colored versus non-colored metal needles for tonification versus dispersion (probably Vietnamese in origin) based on experiment.(279) He was very interested in the electrical correlates of acupuncture, experimenting with instruments to measure pulses and detect points, and one of his students, Niboyet elaborated extensively on this approach in a 1959 publication.

  Figure 123: PROFESSOR WORSLEY’S FIVE ELEMENT CHART

  THE SMALL PRINT READS, “INCORPORATING LAWS OF MOTHER-SON; HUSBAND-WIFE; MID-DAY-MIDNIGHT; AND PULSES.’

  3) He valued the role of both symptomatic diagnosis and treatment–stressing that the acupuncture points become sensitive in illness and must be searched for using that criterion, and gave treatment formulae for numerous medical conditions and protocols for treating pain itself.

  As for Soulié de Morant’s sources, aside from his extensive practical training, he used many classical Oriental texts, but his main ones were two Ming dynasty Chinese texts:1) ZHEN JIU DA CHENG–GREAT COMPENDIUM OF ACUPUNCTURE AND MOXIBUSTION (ZJDC) by Yang Ji-zhou (1601). Soulié de Morant was actually confused about the author and dating of this work, attributing it to Yang Ge-xian, although no such individual has been identified by later commentators. Dr. Jean Choain, Soulie de Morant’s first biographer, corrected this misattribution in 1978. (280)

  2) YI XUE RU MEN–THE BASICS OF MEDICAL STUDIES (YXRM) by Li Yan (Li Zhai-jian) (1575). An eight volume text based on a 100 volume text, GU JIN YI TONG DA QUAN–ANCIENT AND MODERN MEDICAL WAYS by Xu Chun-fu (1556). Soulié de Morant translated Basics as Le Diagnostic par les Pouls radiaux which was published with his c
ommentary in 1983, but is not available in English.

  Soulié de Morant was also influenced by the Japanese work of Sawada as communicated by Nakayama, whose book he translated into French with Ohsawa. As I mentioned, I will return to Ohsawa and Nakayama from quite a different perspective at the end of this history.

  The other source I identified in trying to account for the similarity of Ohsawa’s and Worsley’s approach to acupuncture was Mme. Hashimoto Masae (1899-1981), who taught with Ohsawa in France in 1958. Her story brings in a whole new lineage, which is much less appreciated in the acupuncture community. How she came to teach in Europe is itself an interesting story.(281) While he was living in Paris in 1957, George Ohsawa decided that acupuncture in France, as derived from the teachings of his former collaborator Soulié de Morant, had gotten off in the wrong direction, so he wrote an appeal to the Japanese journal Ido No Nippon for a young but experienced Japanese acupuncturist to come to Paris to help him correct their misguided practice. (It would appear that Ohsawa’s main objection to French acupuncture was its lack of focus on the Five Elements, though he himself used Yin/Yang theory exclusively in his dietary therapy!) Mme. Hashimoto was approached by the editors of Ido No Nippon to be the emissary, as she had recently written a series of articles for the Journal on pulse diagnosis (Fig.125), and had a flourishing practice on Nihonbashi in the fashionable Ginza district of Tokyo. The background to this story is that in 1957, a man named Yoneyama Hiroshishu wrote an article claiming that pulse diagnosis was an inaccurate method and so in rebuttal Ido No Nippon sponsored a study of Hashimoto’s pulse diagnosis in a clinical setting, and found it to be highly accurate. It is curious though, that her method reversed the pulse positions for men and women, an approach that was at odds with all the other myakushin (pulse diagnosis) practitioners. She additionally emphasized the need to take pulses with the fingertips perpendicularly, and to bend the hand into extension (Fig.126). The nails needed to be clipped extremely short. She was also well-known for her use of moxibustion which she advocated in a book written for the layman (this being an aspect of the Sawada lineage). Her treatments were Five Element based, but she didn’t use “energy transfers” via the Five Element cycles. She simply used the pulses to determine the Excess and Deficient conditions of the 12 Meridians, and then directly treated mainly the Deficient Meridians using Five Element, Alarm and other Command Points with very few needles. She confirmed her diagnoses and monitored her treatments by attending to the following Five Element parameters: color, sound, odor, emotion, taste preference, sensory function, climatic preference, medical history, and Meridian and abdominal palpation. Her main criterion for an effective treatment was the normalization of the pulse and decrease of abdominal sensitivity. In keeping track of the lineage and spread of the different traditions, it should be noted that her books and methods were introduced into Taiwan in 1958, which is probably where they were found by Philip Chancellor–the fellow who translated and edited Lavier’s version of Wu Wei-p’ing’s Chinese Acupuncture into English. Hashimoto’s original pulse diagnosis articles from Ido No Nippon had been collated by her into a 1961 publication Japanese Acupuncture, and it was this work which was translated into English by K. Suzuki and edited by Philip Chancellor for publication in 1968 with the same title. Unfortunately, Chancellor died about two years ago, and Hashimoto herself died in 1981, so the details of her impact on acupuncture in the West are somewhat sketchy. As I indicated, she practiced a very simple Five Element style of treatment, and it is clear that her teachings were the basis for the similarities between Ohsawa and Worsley, though she herself again had no known contact with Professor Worsley! (How Worsley was influenced by Soulie de Morant’s teachings also still needs an explanation!) Just as this book was going to press, I did discover a likely lineage for an Ohsawa/Hashimoto to Worsley transmission. A German practitioner from Hamburg, Dr. Elza Munster, who had spent at least two months in clinic with Mme. Hashimoto in Tokyo in 1958 (Fig.127A and B), and who subsequently tutored Nicholas Sofroniou (see Fig.167 to come), one of Worsley’s earliest sources of information on acupuncture, seems to have herself had a definite connection to Worsley. Her name appeared sometime after 1967 on a list (see Worsley and Stemp, second edition, in the bibliography) of destinguished Foreign Members of the Acupuncture Guild, a professional organization started by Worsley when he founded his own college. Since Worsley situated his formative acupuncture studies in Germany, there are reasonable grounds to suspect that Dr. Munster played a role in this transmission. She died in 1994 however, so the magnitude of her influence on Worsley is a matter of pure speculation. Curiously, another disciple of Hashimoto, Takenouchi Misao, who had also been close to Ohsawa, visited England with a group of forty macrobiotic students in 1968 (Fig.127C and D). They visited seven European countries as part of the Second World Cultural Olympics, but although Takenouchi gave demonstrations of acupuncture, he did not give any lectures or otherwise engage in teaching, so it is unlikely that any transmission to Worsley would have taken place through him.