And as COVID-19 spreads globally, and as we act in accordance with the ‘seasonal, geographical and personal factors,’ how should we in Australia and the rest of the world deal with it (coronavirus) in our local real time situation? According to the late Joseph Needham we should use acupuncture or chronoacupuncture’s ‘immunological’and ‘cortisone-like effect’ to fight the invading organism by strengthening the patient’s body resistance. Chinese medical doctrine attributes these disorders to pathogenic' heat' of varying quality from 'warm' ('wen '温) to 'hot' ('re' 熱), which is characteristic of the climate in spring and summer respectively (Hanson, 1998). In premodern China however, wenbing were seen as encompassing a range of illnesses from the common colds, to high fevers and epidemic diseases, all of which were characterized by acute fevers and hot sensations in the patient’s body.
These are primarily characterized by high fever and by their infectious nature, as with typhoid and typhus. the life of the influenza virus or coronavirus embedded within the human body.The ‘outbreak narrative’ of 'wenbing' (influenza) ‘as seen by contemporary practitioners of Chinese medicine is a collective term for disorders that Western biomedicine classifies as acute febrile diseases. Viewed from this perspective, an ‘incubating qi’ can be seen as an expression of the natural yin and yang order of the flow and metamorphoses of life embedded in specific time and place i.e. Imaginaries, imaging figures and narratives can be seen as similar to Foucault’s epistemes, Kuhn’s paradigms, Callon, Law and Latour’s actor-networks, Hacking’s self-vendicating constellations, Fujimura and Star’s standardized packages and boundary objects and Knorr-Certina’s reconfiguration,”David Turnbull’s ‘assemblage, and Donna Haraway’s ‘vision metaphor.’ And an assemblage is a translation medium. It can be seen as an ‘imaging figure, a metaphor or a narrative that has realness achieved in the emergence of gradually clotting and eventually routinized, sets of embodied, in-place actions.’. Together with the concepts of the Yin and Yang, Five Elements, I see 'qi 'as an ontological entity or imaginary. The approach to humour in TCM therapy and indeed TCM itself remain deeply misunderstood, even comically feared, in Western health practices, as will be illustrated by a contemporary experience in Melbourne during the Covid-19 crisis.
This Western notion of the four elements is comparable to the wu xing (five elements) of TCM - mu (wood), huo (fire), tu (earth), jin (metal) and shui (water) - in the sense that in both philosophical systems the elements constitute the ultimate roots of all natural things (Tobyn 1997). The paper explores the clinical consequences that derive from conceptualizing humour in this way and explains how such an understanding of humour may be compared with European theories in classical and medieval times of the four “humours” constituting the human body (yellow bile,blood, phlegm and black bile, which correlate with the four elements of fire, air, water and earth respectively). As the Ming Dynasty scholar Yang Jizhou (1522-1620), wrote, “People who are happy suffer from less illness because their qi flows harmoniously and in a relaxed manner along the acutracts” (quoted in Yang 1984). Humour is thus a function of the operations of what the presenter calls the “endogenous heart” (the physical heart and its animating forces, which generate emotions). This paper describes the physical basis for humour according to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which humorous things (funny stories or jokes that make one break into smiles or laughter) are linked with the emotions of happiness and joy.
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