Early Medicine in The Edo Period, Japan

Medicine Acupuncture Edo Period Japan

Reading early medicine in the edo period Japan, especially the way of zen in the body and It’s function loads of reference to Chi. The description of lymphatic function from early Chinese medicine.

A number of clients have been Combining Acupuncture and lymphatic drainage sessions with good results esp for skin condition, so this tweaked my interest when I stumbled on the article.

An excerpt from the below article reads. “About 450 kilometers away, on a quiet street in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward, the lesser-known Ejima Sugiyama Shrine sits, dedicated to a man known as the god of acupuncture. In Shintoism, gods are believed to reside in objects of the natural world — rivers, mountains, and animals — even in ordinary human beings, whose spirits are enshrined in some of the 80,000 shrines in Japan.

One such ordinary man, Waichi Sugiyama, made extraordinary contributions to the field of acupuncture. Born in 1610, he went blind at an early age after contracting smallpox. For the blind in Japan at the time, the primary jobs available were acupuncturist or traditional massage therapist. At 18, he traveled to Edo (now Tokyo) to apprentice for a famed blind acupuncturist.”

Anyone interested in Acupuncture the article below is a great history read.