Moxa in Nineteenth-century Medical Practice

While we may think of moxa as a therapeutic technique that has been introduced to the United States in the last few decades of the twentieth century, this oriental healing procedure that applies the heat of burning herbs to acupuncture points was first employed in the United States by American physicians nearly two hundred years ago. Conceptualized as a counter-irritation method, moxa was used to treat a range of conditions, including inflammation, organ dysfunction, pain, and paralysis. Moxa's presence in nineteenth-century medicine was neither widespread nor of long duration, however, and notes of its use appear in medical records and doctors' daybooks only from the 1820s to the 1840s. Ultimately, moxa would be replaced by new procedures such as galvanism and the electro-magnetic machine. The tale of how doctors acquired and used moxa in the early nineteenth century is interesting in its own right. But the story of why this treatment was abandoned ties moxa to the larger saga of medicine's paradigm shift to bio-medical science and technology.