The history of medicine isn’t just about treatments and techniques—it’s about migration, adaptation, and how healing traditions take root in new landscapes. The movement of Chinese medicine to the American West is a story woven with resilience, ingenuity, and cultural exchange.

In this conversation with historian Tamara Venit-Shelton, we explore the migration of Chinese medicine through the lens of immigration, frontier life, and evolving medical landscapes. Her research uncovers the untold stories of Chinese herbalists, the communities they served, and the challenges they faced in an unfamiliar land.

Listen into this discussion as we trace the paths of early Chinese practitioners, the role of herbal medicine in frontier healthcare, the legal and social battles they encountered, and the ways in which Chinese medicine shaped—and was shaped by—the American medical landscape.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• How Chinese medicine took root in the American West
• The role of early Chinese herbalists in frontier communities
• Challenges of sourcing herbs and how substitutions were made
• Interactions between Chinese doctors and Western medical practitioners
• The impact of anti-Chinese laws on medical practice
• Legal battles and arrests of Chinese herbalists
• The role of Chinese medicine in treating epidemics in mining towns
• Cultural perceptions of Chinese medicine in the 19th and early 20th centuries
• The involvement of Chinese herbalists in women’s health and gynecology
• Herbal medicine as an alternative to surgery in early America
• The influence of Confucian philosophy on Chinese medical traditions
• How Chinese herbalists adapted their treatments to local conditions
• The shifting role of acupuncture in Chinese medicine’s migration
• The influence of Nixon’s visit to China on the re-emergence of acupuncture in the U.S.
• The continued evolution of Chinese medicine in modern integrative healthcare

Tamara Venit-Shelton, Ph.D.

I am a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College where I teach courses on the American West, Asian American history, environmental history, and the history of medicine. I am the author of two books: A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850-1900 (University of California Press, 2013) and Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace (Yale University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Phi Alpha Theta Award for Best Book.
Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace chronicles roughly two hundred years of Chinese medicine as a dynamic system of knowledge, therapies, and materia medica brought to the United States and transformed by immigrants, doctors, and patients as well as missionaries, scientists, and merchants.

Chinese medicine has a long history in the United States, dating back to its colonial period and extending up to the present. Well before mass emigration from China to the United States began, Chinese materia medica crossed the oceans, in both directions: Chinese medicinal teas and herbs came west while Appalachian ginseng went east. Beginning in the 1850s, Chinese immigrants came to the United States and transplanted their health practices, sometimes quite literally by propagating medicinal plants in their adopted home.

Chinese doctors established businesses that catered to both Chinese and non-Chinese patients. They struggled during the Great Depression and World War II, but conditions that seemed to precipitate the decline of Chinese medicine in the United States in fact laid the foundations for its rediscovery in the 1970s. Over time, Chinese medicine – along with other medical knowledge systems deemed “irregular,” “alternative,” or “unorthodox” – both facilitated and undermined the consolidation of medical authority among formally trained western-style medical scientists.

Links and Resources

Tamara has two books:

Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors in the American Medical Marketplace and A Squatter's Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850-1900 

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