According to Robert Temple in his book The Genius of China, the Chinese were isolating sex and pituitary hormones from the urine by sublimation as early as the 2nd century bc and using them for medicinal purposes. The crystals they obtained were traditionally called “autumn mineral,” being likened to the hoarfrost of the autumn and were said to be used by the Prince of Han in 125 bc.

Western interest in Chinese and other Eastern medicines has a long history, extending back to classical times. In 1669, the great philosopher Leibniz regarded Chinese medicine as “at least as good as that of Europe.” East Meets West, an exhibition at the Science Museum, shows that the influence of traditional eastern medicines has extended far beyond the realms of endocrinology. Methods of diagnosis such as the reading of the pulse and preventing disease through vaccination were brought back to the West by Christian missionaries and foreign doctors from China.

Equally, many ideas on treatment have originated from the traditional Indian medical systems of Ayurveda and Unani, including the technique of facial repair advocated in the Ayurveda text Sushruta Samhita, which fostered the discipline of plastic surgery.

Medical discoveries and technologies have passed both ways over the centuries. The exhibition explores how medicine evolved in Greek and Islamic cultures led to a renaissance in Western culture; the harmony of Islamic and Indian medical traditions in India, with a subsequent exchange of practices with the West through Britain’s colonisation of the subcontinent; the transfer of medical ideas between Chinese doctors and Christian missionaries; and the origins of smallpox inoculation, conceived in the East but refined in the West.

The exhibition also displays other traditional Eastern medical practices that have not been incorporated so readily into the Western model of medicine—such as acupuncture and moxibustion, the application of burning leaves of the mugwort to acupuncture sites in an effort to restore harmony of yin and yang. These examples hint at the fundamental differences in culture and ideology that have formed and moulded traditional as well as modern medicine, a reason for their uneasy coexistence in many societies today.