The Etymology of Acupuncture
Acupuncture is one of those medical words where a foreign practice is given a wholly Latin name. The technique itself is ancient — Chinese medical texts describe needle therapy from at least the second century BC, and the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon (Huangdi Neijing) systematised it. Europeans encountered the practice through seventeenth-century Dutch traders and Jesuits in China and Japan; in 1683 the Dutch physician Willem ten Rhijne published an account in Latin that introduced the term acupunctura, formed from Latin acus (needle) and punctura (a pricking, from pungere). English picked the word up in 1684. The Chinese themselves call the discipline 针灸 (zhēnjiǔ), literally needle and moxa — moxibustion, the burning of mugwort over acupuncture points, has always been the practice’s traditional partner. The Latin coinage captures only the needle half. Acus also gives English aciform (needle-shaped) and the cognate scientific term aculeate.