The Origins of Discrimination Against Visually Impaired Japanese Acupuncture and Moxibustion in Japan’s Move from Holistic to Mechanistic Views of the Human Body

Abstract

In Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1867), blind persons often practiced acupuncture and moxibustion. In the Meiji Period (1868-1912), acupuncture and moxibustion declined more than traditional herbal medicine. After WWII, some scholars attributed this greater decline of acupuncture and moxibustion to discrimination against its blind practitioners. This study reconsiders that position through a review of the historical literature. Traditional medicine took a holistic organic view of the body as energy (qi), but Western theories introduced in the Meiji Period took a more mechanistic view of the human body. This dominance of the mechanistic over the holistic organic view of the body temporally coincided with the rise in evolutionary views that disparaged the visually impaired. The tendency of Japanese eugenic policies to view humans as tools to serve the nation-state is what led people to stigmatize the blind (cf. Goffman).