Donald Mainfort speaks on the evolution of TCM from its earliest known records to modern manifestations.

Speaker: Donald Mainfort
Location: The Halpern Centre, Simon Fraser University
Time: 7:30pm
Open to: the public
Admission: free

The early history of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been wrought with speculative and often conflicting claims. One common theme is that thousands of years of continuous oral and written tradition have yielded a venerable system of diagnosis and treatment that remains popular today. But what, exactly comprises this tradition?

After reviewing the available publications and conducting interviews with a wide variety of sinologists, paleographers and Chinese medical historians, Mainfort outlines what he considers to be a verifiably accurate consensus on information gleaned from recently excavated medical texts dating from 300-200 BC that provide valuable insights into the early origins of the Chinese medical concept of "Qi", along with detailed methods of TCM practice from this period.

This is followed by a brief history of the "Jianghu", or wandering spirit masters, leading to the official coining of the word "qigong", in 1955. The subsequent, modernized, pseudoscientific version of Qi wizardry culminates in the "Creating Gods in China" qigong movement of the 1980's. Mainfort concludes with some contemporary examples of pseudoscientific qigong "experiments".