In 1902 brothers Tom Leong and T. Foo Yuen, two Physicians of Oriental Medicine and practicing in Los Angeles, CA published a 306 page manuscript titled The Science of Oriental Medicine, Diet and Hygiene.
It's a full advertisement for the the clinic, the services and credentials of both physicians; and through anecdotes and cordial descriptions of zang fu theory, the indisputable efficacy of a system of medicine over 3000 years old. It is also a kindly text that was written by W.A. Hallowell Jr., the same mustachioed westerner posing for patient with T. Foo Yuen in the photo below and who also holds copy-write of the text. There is no mention of this supposition in any item description I've found but his ownership of copy-write may be enough evidence to say so. The voice of the text has an accessible, no-nonsense romanticism about it that feels literary but with real science behind it.
Each book was complimentary to their patients and so a free and viable resource to the reading public regarding health and wellness by means of a very foreign medical system in their own words. It's not a clinical text by any means. It's an expose for a new century American public about the science and efficacy of Chinese Medicine. It is also a testament to the remarkable curing skills of two brothers educated at the Emperial College of Medicine in Peking, China and who wished to found the first college of Chinese Medicine in the States! How different things would be if regulating bodies for colleges of OM and for the practice of this medicine in the US had been established over a hundred years ago. But how different things are now. How exciting to see their dream for Chinese Medical education in the states amass to over 35 accredited colleges of acupuncture and oriental medicine (nineteen of which are in California--five schools in Los Angeles County alone), and many with externships in western medical centers. Dr. T. Foo Yuen and his brother Dr. Leong never did create the first American school of Chinese Medicine that they had planned for. The first OM College (1) in the states wasn't founded for another seventy-three years after the book's publication and that happened in Newton, Massachusetts, at other end of the country. What happened to Drs Tom Foo Yuen and Leong and the Foo & Wing Herb Company after the book's publication. Certainly they continued to enjoy the success of their practice for the rest of their life. But did they stay in L.A.? What happened to Dr. T. Yuen's son, Tom How Wing, pictured in the center of the photo on the book's second page? Prejudice againt the Chinese was great in early Industrial America. They were regarded as the cheap laborers building camps in growing cities, and stealing opportunities from those of other immigrants and natives. Many people regarded them with little to no value, or even as devils, so it wasn't a great surprise to find the following degrading article against the Chinese and their medicine published March of 1913, eleven years after the Foo & Wing Herb Company publication, by California State Journal of Medicine, Vol. XI, No. 3 by Dr. Charles Kirkland Roys M.D., Wei-hsien, China (2)
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/.../pdf/calstatejmed00125-0017.pdf
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It's a scathing review of Chinese Medicine and the Chinese as a people. Dr. Kirkland refers to the book many times as a pamphlet, disregarding its impressive weight of 300 plus pages of empirical wisdom never before heard of by an American public. He is not shy with his trackless commentaries demeaning the Chinese as "heathens", and even misquoting a Chinese Proverb to declare, under his breath, that "the ordinary [Chinese] physician is a murderer." When this article was published Dr. Roys and his family had already been stationed in China as missionaries for the Presbyterian Church for ten years! "Even the best of them," he continues, "graduates of the Imperial Medical College, are the merest ignorant empirics."
He concludes that the growing use of Oriental Medicine by the people of Los Angeles, Boston and Brooklyn, where they always welcome something new, will soon tire of these fads as they did with theosophy, for example. It's not difficult to imagine that against the backdrop of such caustic rhetoric and prejudice how impossible it would be to realize a school of Chinese Medicine in America. How far we've come, and how exciting that we have so much further we can go.
As far as the question of what ever happened to the two Chinese Doctors from Peking and Dr. Yuen's son who stood to inherit it all? The trail stops with a blog-post I found that linked to a colored postcard on Ebay advertising the Foo & Wing Herb Company. However, the item is no longer listed. We may never know.
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1. New England College of Acupuncture, founded in 1975 by Dr. James Tin Yau So and his students.
2. "Charles K. Roys and [his wife] Mabel Milham Roys, were appointed as missionaries to Weihsien, Shantung Province, by the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Dr. Roys was chief surgeon at the teaching hospital in Wei Hsien until 1916, when the Royses were transferred to Tsinan. The family was forced to return to the United States in early 1920 when Dr. Roys was diagnosed with a brain tumor." He died later that year. --Botanic Garden News, 2004
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Here's the link to the full document and the Internet Archive where I found it and a whole lot more:
http://www.archive.org/stream/scienceoforienta00foowrich#page/n13/mode/2up
