傳統醫療 Traditional Medicine

Before the Han Chinese immigrated in large numbers, some of the aborigines in Taiwan believed that their concept of illness was due to punishment by the gods or the presence of evil spirits. For this reason, there were shamans or witches in each tribe who used herbs or sorcery to cure their people's illnesses. Like witch doctors of the Tsou tribe in Taiwan are men, called "ruiho". There are many ways for witchdoctors to expel illnesses, the most common of which is to hold a blade of grass called tapaniyo and shake it over the patient's head and affected area while reciting an incantation. The photo below shows a witch doctor performing an operation on a woman.

Source from  Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank 

https://cmsdb.culture.tw/object/E34D3811-02BE-4A07-8289-99D3D0C9E136<br>

Herbal medicine is also an important part of Chinese medicine, which uses a variety of herbs to treat illness. Herbs are used according to different diseases and body types to balance yin 陰 and yang陽 in the body and regulate energy (qi 氣) and blood ( xue 血). In addition, acupuncture and massage are both specialities of traditional Chinese medicine. Acupuncture and moxibustion were used to unblock meridians and regulate qi and blood through the use of specific acupuncture points, while massage was used to achieve similar effects through massage techniques. Traditional Chinese medicine is mainly passed down from master to student and was not taught in formal schools in the early days.

In July 1901, the Governor General's Office announced Order No. 47 of the Taiwan Medical Exemption Rules, which regulated Chinese medicine. All states in Taiwan held examinations to certify Chinese medicine practitioners and awarded 1903 certificates. Thereafter, there were no more similar examinations to weed out the Chinese medicine practitioners. It is worth noting that since the establishment of the qualification of Chinese medicine practitioners in 1902, the number of Chinese medicine practitioners had been decreasing year by year, and in 1920, it began to be less than the number of Western medicine practitioners (Chen, 2020).

In order to make up for the lack of research on the advantages and disadvantages of Western medicines and Chinese medicines and their respective efficacy in Taiwan's medical field, Lin Tien-Ding 林天定, a lecturer at the Taiwan Institute of Chinese Medicine, conducted a series of researches on Chinese medicines and published a book entitled "Chinese Medicine in Taiwan" in 19ˇ31, which mainly contains the aliases of various types of Chinese medicines, their places of origin, their forms, their properties and their efficacy. The contents of the book mainly contain the aliases, places of origin, forms, properties and therapeutic effects of various types of Chinese medicines, with a collection of questions and answers on the "Rules for the Prohibition of the Sale of Drugs in Taiwan"「臺灣賣藥取締規則」 and the "Questions on the Regulations of the Chinese Medicine Traders' Tests"「漢藥種商試驗法規問題」, which are intended to serve as references for the candidates of the Chinese medicine traders' qualification examination.