Paul U. Unschuld: Ein Recht auf Gesundheit?

Medizintheoretische Erörterung im Kulturvergleich Europa – China

This paper suggests that a „right to health“ is not a result of recent developments in health care politics. Rather, a “right to health” lies at the very conceptual foundation of a new type of medicine that emerged in ancient Greece and China in the second half of the first millennium BCE. Concomitant with the acceptance of laws as an essential precondition for social stability in the polis democracy and in the ever growing political entities at the end of the Zhou era, a notion of laws of nature emerged that was soon extended to an interpretation of the healthy and diseased states of the human organism. In view of the Chinese situation available sources indicate, however, that in the same way as not all intellectuals believed in the complex imperial structure as the best possible social organisation, only a fraction of Chinese medical theoreticians supported a medicine based on the notions of systematic correspondence. Hence the conceptualization of health care in China over the past two millennia was marked by a dichotomy that can be seen, albeit less clearly, in the history of European medicine as well. One style of thought saw a limited number of diseased states of a human organism as the cause of an unlimited number of individual pathological conditions. Disease was considered a deviation from norms well-defined by the yinyang and Five Agents theories. Persons abiding by the laws of yinyang and Five Agents were promised a right to health. The alternative style of thought focussed on individual ailment, and stimulated its followers to accumulate ever more substances, combined in ever more recipes, to be prepared for innumerable possibilities of illness. This approach failed to acknowledge the value of norms and laws of nature, and was based on a notion of an inevitability of illness. The present paper discusses the ideological background and historical data of these approaches, as well as the different therapeutic strategies, i.e., acupuncture and pharmaceutical prescriptions, that were associated with them.

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