Bloated Bellies and Bleeding Thyroids: Needling at Gendered Bodies in Acupuncture Anesthesia (1950-1970)

Acupuncture analgesia seemed relatively straightforward. The patient lay awake as a practitioner needled selected sites on the body to induce numbness for surgery. Numerous reports emerging from China in the 1970s featured women and men resting on operating tables, smiling into the camera, surrounded by doctors who attended to the excised region—the esophagus, brain, belly, heart, or lungs. Readers were as amazed as they were skeptical. To one critic, acupuncture analgesia worked, but it only worked on Communist Chinese bodies. Beyond the ontological debates that surrounded how needling actually worked, was the curious ways in which the patient and practitioner both participated in a choreography of knowledge production. Needling-induced numbness allowed the patient to lie awake during the operation. She could ask questions, drink tea, eat fruit as nurses reached into her body to remove an ovarian cyst. This paper argues that the choreographed epistemology of the operating room, or “improvised medicine” as Julie Livingston would put it, re-constituted dualities that defined expertise, indigenous knowledge, and gender. Between the patient and practitioner, zhongyi (“Chinese” medicine) and xiyi (“Western” medicine), and feminine and masculine bodies were the multiple effects of needling that challenged assumptions about how responses to pain changed over time. Those who tested the effects of needling-induced numbness in Singapore, Hong Kong, Michigan, Berlin, and Shanghai hoped that its universalizing effects could reflect the universal properties of needling—that it could temper the idiosyncratic nature of the body and collapse conceptual differences. By drawing on literature in transnational feminism and postcolonial STS, this paper offers a cultural history of neuroscience through the queering effects of needling in the operating room.