How to be a good Maoist doctor

Adapted from a short play written by the Shanghai Chest Hospital Amateur Art Group (Shanghai shi xiongke yiyuan yeyu wenyi chuangzuozu), An Ode to the Silver Needle Under a Shadowless Lamp (Wuyingdeng xia song yinzhen, 1974, hereinafter Silver Needle) was one of a small handful of films about medicine released during the latter part of what is commonly known as the “Cultural Revolution era” (1966-1976). What makes Silver Needle remarkable as a primary source is its subject matter: it is the only Chinese film from the period that portrays the practice of “acupuncture anaesthesia” (zhenci mazui or zhenma) in an urban, hospital setting. Other Cultural Revolution films on medicine and healthcare focussed exclusively on “barefoot doctors” (chijiao yisheng)—rural residents who received some medical training and delivered basic healthcare to China’s vast countryside and frontier regions (Fang 2012, Scheid 2013: 261-2, Lan 2015, Pang 2017: 101-34). Silver Needle celebrates acupuncture anaesthesia as one of the crowning achievements of Traditional Chinese Medicine in combination with Maoist ideology (Hsu 1996, Taylor 2005: 138-9, Hayot 2009: 207-45). The film also prescribes a model of the revolutionary doctor dedicated to serving the Chinese masses. Silver Needle dramatises a protracted debate on the political status of expertise and experts that began after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, intensified in 1957-1958, and climaxed during the late-1960s and early-1970s (Lynteris 2013: 58-89, Andreas 2009).