Wellcome Images

In my last couple of posts, I discussed how the Christian church used to forbid physicians from cutting into bodies, which left them with few diagnostic tools besides examining urine and feeling pulses. Traditional Chinese medicine took it a step further. From about the 1700s to the 1950s, aristocratic ladies (or their servants) remained hidden behind a curtain. The doctor would hand over a “diagnostic doll” and the woman, revealing just her hands through the curtain, would point to the place on the doll that corresponded to the place on her own body that hurt.

Wellcome Images