Bat droppings were once a prized Chinese medicine for sharp eyesight. The logic: bats fly at night, so their eyes must be extraordinary — and dung, after all, is the concentrated essence of food. The remedy even had a beautiful name: Yeming Sha, "night-bright sand."
The only problem: bats are nearly blind. They navigate by ultrasound.
Traditional Chinese medicine did not choose grand narratives. It was the only option it had.
Its theory speaks of heaven and man mirroring each other, yin-yang and the five elements, ascending and descending, the qi of good and evil — and with this vocabulary it can explain any disease, ever. Why always speak so grandly, never microscopically? Because it cannot do otherwise. It never invented the microscope, never practiced dissection, never had chemistry, physics, or biology — no knowledge of molecules, cells, bacteria, viruses, nerves, hormones, or compounds. It did not know how drugs work or how the body runs, so it watched from the outside and guessed.
The guesses became a whole system of "taking the shape as the cure" (yi xing bu xing):
The pangolin tunnels through mountains, so its hard shell, boiled, must open blocked milk ducts. (Today we could just rent a tunnel-boring machine.)
Ginseng makes your nose bleed, so your vital energy must be overflowing — a great tonic. (It is ginsenoside poisoning.)
Mercury makes people quiet and still, so it calms the mind — the main ingredient of the famous "Calming Spirit Decoction." (It is poisoning.)
Walnuts look like brains, so they nourish the brain. Red dates and goji berries are red, so they tonify blood. Deer antler is long and hard, so it strengthens virility. Chives contain the character "long-lasting," so chives strengthen virility.
Rabbits have split lips, so a pregnant woman must not eat rabbit, or the fetus will have a cleft lip. A man's pubic hair curls like a snake, so pubic hair cures snakebite.
And because dung is the concentrated essence of food, all dung enters the pharmacopoeia.
Pig dung for cold, jaundice, and dampness. White dog dung — preferably still warm — for heart pain. Sheep dung for infant diarrhea, constipation, and gray hair (sheep eat fast, defecate fast, and the droppings are black). Water buffalo dung for edema (a water buffalo stands in water all day without swelling). Cat dung for pox sores. Rat dung for infant epilepsy.
The best of all is human dung, known as ren zhong huang — and the most precious human dung belongs to the emperor. The Son of Heaven, of supreme rank in the hierarchy of ruler and subject, produced a sovereign remedy said to cure everything and prolong life. Before dawn every day, herbal shops crowded the palace gates, bidding hundreds of taels of silver to buy the emperor's fresh morning offering from the eunuchs. The waiting list stretched years long — a market with no supply, because there is only one emperor, eating only so much. Some eunuchs quietly sold their own instead.
Everything strange went into the pot: menstrual blood, children's urine, umbilical cords, fingernails, insects, the rope of a hanged man, dust from the head of the bed, a pair of old underpants, earwax. Boil it all together, and it could all be drunk.
The glass argument.
Chinese medicine never knew sperm or eggs. It only knew that a woman who has not conceived has menstrual blood, and a man has semen; join the two, both disappear, and months later a life appears. So humans are made of the father's semen and the mother's blood. Since there must be two pulses in a pregnant belly, physicians invented the "happy pulse," also called the "linked-pearl pulse": two pulses rolling together, "smooth, like a bead running over a plate."
None of this was stupidity. Without glass there are no test tubes; without test tubes there is no chemistry; without chemistry you cannot extract HCG, the pregnancy hormone, from blood. Western medicine sells you ten test strips for a dollar fifty. Western doctors also know there is a radial artery in the wrist — but they do not need to feel it, because no amount of pressing on a pregnant woman's wrist will ever find a fetal pulse.
The nephew argument.
My little nephew, an elementary-schooler, at the New Year family table: whenever the talk turns to beating America, Japan, Korea, Australia, the tiny boy gets ecstatic — this one is bad, that one is bad, he will transform into Ultraman Tiga and fire the Zeperion Ray at each country in turn. So I made him a deal: finish his winter-vacation math homework, and then he may research missiles to fire at them. The room went dead silent. A whole morning hunched over the desk, the paper stabbed to shreds — not one digit written.
Grand narratives are easy. Math homework is microscopic — and that, exactly, is the thing he cannot do.
