With Needle & Wormwood

China's Communists have recently reported striking victories over some of the country's ancient scourges. Amoebic dysentery, for instance, is rampant where drinking water is likely to come from an open sewer, and by the standards of Western medicine it is a stubborn disorder to cure. But a hospital in Shanghai reports 100% success in 16 cases treated with pai ton weng (white-haired elder), a medicinal herb touted in a medical classic of about 2,000 years ago. So now a factory in Hankow is making a drug brewed from this widely grown herb.

What has happened with pai tou weng is typical of the fate of Chinese medicine under the Reds.

Long & Short. In the old days the wealthier Chinese in the cities could count on a handful of Western-trained doctors practicing modern medicine; in the far interior many of the poorest Chinese got equally good care, free, from medical missions. In between, tens of millions relied on the thousands of traditional and often secret herb remedies. For serious ills they might seek treatment by a doctor versed in acupuncture (TIME, June 2, 1952), in which special needles are thrust into the body at a specified angle and to a certain depth, and in surprising places considering the complaint (to cure headaches, the needle may be thrust into the great toe). Sometimes combined with acupuncture was cautery: searing the skin with burning wormwood leaves.

When the Reds seized power, they promised to do away with such "feudal practices" and to set up health centers, and they launched roving health teams to combat epidemics and contagious diseases. Peking now reports that since 1950 cholera has been wiped out, the incidence of plague reduced by 90%, of smallpox by 95%. Actually, the Reds' whole health program has foundered because of lack of doctors. The Reds' own press soon had to admit that aggrieved Shanghailanders had coined a tag phrase, "Three long, one short," to describe their medical care: long periods of waiting for a clinic reservation, for registration and for treatment, but a short time for diagnosis. From the Red press, too, came horrifying stories that modern drugs made in China were often unfit for use--loaded with wrong ingredients and impurities such as broken glass, hair, grass or bits of iron.

Headaches & Blood Pressure. Red reformers did a complete flipflop. Health Minister Li Teh-chuan* began praising the "medical legacy of the nation" and the efficacy of herb medicines "proved by several thousand years' clinical experience." Some, of course, may actually be beneficial: Western doctors do not forget that they have derived modern wonders such as quinine and reserpine from primitive cures. But the vast majority are as useless as ground-up rhinoceros horn to cure impotence. Still, the peasants are being ordered to plant more medicinal herbs, and Government agencies are buying them and keeping prices down. Government chemists are trying to extract pills and concentrates.

In Canton a group of well-known physicians "voluntarily" published 56 prescriptions that had been treasured secrets in their families for generations. As for acupuncture and cautery, six clinics are giving wholesale treatments for more than 200 maladies, including nervous breakdown, chronic rheumatism, headaches, facial paralysis, high blood pressure and menstrual disorders. The results? Say the Red propagandists with a straight face: "Ninety percent effective."

* Widow of the misnamed "Christian general" of civil war days, Feng Yu-hsiang.

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