FRENCH PIONEERS OF ACUPUNCTURE IN THE WEST

In 1688, Louis XIV of France sent five Jesuit missionaries to China. They brought back to Europe possibly the first documents on traditional Chinese medicine to reach the west. They interested a few people in the French medical world for a short period of time, and then were largely forgotten.

Centuries later, in 1905, George Soulie de Morant arrived in Beijing as part of the French diplomatic corps in the middle of a cholera epidemic. Two of Soulie de Morant’s servants and one French friend died of the cholera, and then he noticed that a traditional medicine practitioner, Dr Yang, was getting better results treating victims of the epidemic with acupuncture than anybody else was with other techniques.

Soulie de Morant decided to study with Dr Yang and then went on to study with another practitioner, Dr Tchang, in Shanghai. He went on to be given the rank of academician and was granted authorisation to practise in China.

Upon return to France, Soulie de Morant met Dr Paul Ferreyrolles, a thermal doctor who became fascinated by acupuncture, and in 1932 the first acupuncture consultation in a western hospital took place in Bichat under Professor Charles Flandin. This was a major starting point in the use of acupuncture not just in France but in the western world.

Interest spread, and Soulie de Morant went on to become a famous acupuncturist in the west, giving lessons in the discipline in the hospital. He was proposed for the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1950 by a student, Professor Paul Meriel, of Toulouse. Unfortunately the local medical association brought a complaint against him for the illegal practice of medicine, which affected him deeply, and he suffered a stroke in the fifties, dying on 10 May 1955 of a heart attack.

George Soulie de Morant is famous as one of the principal proponents of acupuncture in France and the west and for his translations of Chinese literature. A room in the Chinese medicine museum in Kunming bears his name.