On the evening of 11 March, 2020, the Institute of Cultural Heritage and History of Science & Technology held the 216th lecture of the Academic Forum on the History of Science and Technology—'Thoughts on several scientific and cultural issues in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic’. The lecture invited the director of the Center for Science and Technology Communication and Popularization of CAST and Tsinghua University, the vice president of the China Book Review Association, and Professor Liu Bing from the Department of the History of Science at the Tsinghua University School of Humanities. The lecture was presided by Vice Dean Professor Zhang Meifang. The online video conference was hosted on the ‘cloud’ and was attended by more than 100 people, including students and faculty members from our school and visiting scholars from overseas.
Professor Liu conducted an in-depth academic analysis and discussion on the ‘dispute between Chinese and Western medicine’ with regards to the information disseminated for COVID-19 treatment in the following dimensions:
1. The ‘construction’ of the body in medical science
In recent years, studies on the human body have gradually increased. They can be divided into two types: the physical body at the ontological level and the social body at the constructive level, the latter of which has now become a hotspot in various fields of the humanities and social sciences.
2. The ‘body’ under different medical theories
Prof. Liu used the comparison of how ‘pulse’ is understood between ancient Greek medicine and traditional Chinese medicine in the book ‘The Expressiveness of the Body’ by Harvard University Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama, as an example. The example demonstrates that the two kinds of medicine differ in their perception of the same bodily object, direct experience, imagination, cognitive acquisition, and descriptive language.
3. Local knowledge and scientific diversity
The research objects and samples used in the traditional philosophy of science are primarily Western science. However, in recent years, with the development of the STS field, discussions about scientific and local issues are increasingly worthy of our attention. How the concept of ‘local knowledge’ should be understood and perceived remains an issue that can and needs to be discussed.
4. What is ‘Chinese medicine’
Traditional Chinese medicine is not only the type of medicine used by practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine; like Western medicine, Chinese medicine has its own theories based on reasoning, drug compatibility, and treatment. There are difficulties in verifying the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine against Western medicine as they are very different. Traditional Chinese medicine is good at understanding, applying, and using different types of ‘poison’; it emphasises error corrections.
5. Placebo effect
To conclude the dispute regarding the placebo effect involved in medical efficacy, Prof. Liu cites the core discussion of the placebo effect in the book ‘Dr. Golem’, which identified the factors that influence modern Western medical trials. These factors include the experimenter-reported effect, patient-reported effect, and observer-expectancy effect. The discussion also examined whether the placebo effect can be used systematically in treatments and whether the ‘placebo effect’ really exists. The placebo effect serves as a clear reminder of the uncertainty that exists in modern medicine and remains a major challenge in medical science.
After the lecture, students and teachers from our school asked questions about the content of the lecture, such as the social causes of the dispute between Chinese and Western medicine, how the general public should respond and choose medical treatment, and how to discern scientific reports during the pandemic properly.