Word: changefulness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Liao Chang-shin was an innkeeper in Changshow, a little Yangtze river port some 60 miles from Chungking. Business was brisk and Liao seemed at peace with the world. When, from time to time, somebody disappeared in Changshow without leaving a trace, the innkeeper, like most of Changshow's citizens, shrugged his shoulders. People are always disappearing these days...
...keeping with Chinese medical ethics (as written by Sun Ssu-miao in the 7th Century A.D.), which are much like those outlined in the Western world's Hippocratic oath, Dr. Chang treats poor patients as carefully as the rich, charges them nothing. His middle-class patients pay about $100,000 Chinese ($200 American) a day. His upper-crust patients pay in largesse of the realm-fine furs and such succulent delicacies as sharks' fins and bears' paws...
Like other well-trained herbalists, Dr. Chang follows old texts going back to the foundation of Chinese medicine more than 4,000 years ago. Besides a thousand & one herbs, he uses concoctions of such weird ingredients as the gallstones of horses, rats' foetuses pickled in oil, powdered snakes, powdered horns, musk...
...Vapors. While Dr. Chang does not deny the existence of microbes, he operates on the basis of chi (vapors)-spring, summer, autumn and winter vapors which may enter the body and produce changes. A stomachache is often merely too much chi in the belly. For this Dr. Chang occasionally prescribes sneezing powder which releases the pressure pain from the stomach. The theory is the same as lifting the lid of a spouting tea kettle to release steam. After Western laxatives had failed to relieve a certain Cabinet member, Dr. Chang prescribed a herb to "heat the vapor of the spleen...
...Chang's successes (and perhaps also the shortage of Western drugs) has provoked a press campaign in Chungking urging support of the oldtime doctors. Even Westerners agree that there is a lot of common sense in Dr. Chang's methods-he is a good doctor who knows symptoms, takes pulses, fits the medicine to the patient's needs. And some Chinese medicines have panned out by Western standards (e.g., "ma-huang," known in America as ephedrine, a drug which constricts blood vessels). But Dr. Chang is an exception: in the hands of most village practitioners, the native...