ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to heighten understanding of how far the response of the British medical profession to acupuncture has come about as a result of professional self-interests in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is an important task in its own right given the continuing paucity of scholarly analyses of the influence of social factors on the medical reception of acupuncture in the West, as initially highlighted by Quen (1975a). However, the main rationale for studying the marginal practice of acupuncture in the British context is to illustrate the application of the research framework for examining the altruism claims of the professions. In this sense, it will be recalled that a central part of the strategy proposed for evaluating the role of professional self-interests in decision-making was to consider the most plausible alternative explanations of the phenomenon under discussion. It was argued that if these competing explanations could be dismissed this would considerably strengthen, if not conclusively demonstrate, the case for attributing decisive causal responsibility to professional self-interests. Accordingly, this chapter endeavours to assess systematically the superficially most plausible alternative explanations to that of the interests of the medical profession, or segments thereof, in accounting for the generally unfavourable medical climate of reception of acupuncture which has existed, to varying degrees, since the early nineteenth century in Britain-as a prelude to a more direct consideration of the evidence bearing on the self-interest hypothesis in Chapter 6.
