Chicken blood jabs? How fowl

QUESTION Chinese Communists once promoted chicken-blood therapy. Did it work?

‘CHICKEN-BLOOD therapy’ was the invention of Chinese medic Yu Changshi. Yu, aged 19, and while studying at the Shanghai Medical University in 1921, joined the China Socialist Youth League and became a lifelong member of the Chinese Communist Party.

According to Yu’s account, in November 1952, while he was a hygiene worker in Nanping, Jiangxi Province, he obtained a rectal measurement of the body temperature of a chicken, a figure of around 43c.

He deduced ‘ such a high body temperature was a result of the regulating effect of the central nervous system and the high heating function of the blood’.

In traditional Chinese medicine, there are many records of ingesting or applying chicken blood to treat illnesses. Yu saw the next step as injecting the substance.

The therapy involved drawing blood from a cockerel and injecting it into the patient, intramuscularly but sometimes intravenously.

Claimed benefits included making the patient highly energised, aggressive and strong.

The ‘cure’ became a major medical craze in Communist China, but chicken-blood therapy is viewed in the West as a pseudoscience.

It was banned by the Chinese health authorities in 1965. During the Cultural Revolution (19661976), the Ministry of Health reversed the ban. Throughout the decade, people lined up outside dispensaries, cockerel in hand, to receive injections of chicken blood.

A contemporary study from the Shanghai Health Bureau, of 688 test cases over the course of two years, suggested that it was successful in relieving peptic ulcers and heavy menstrual bleeding. It also reported increased appetites, better sleep and improved mood.

Adverse reactions included chills, fever, diarrhoea, swollen lymph nodes, hives, pain and shock.

Following the Cultural Revolution, the practice was abandoned.

Mrs O. L. Long, London N11.

QUESTION Were five of the first six U.S. Presidents of Welsh descent?

FURTHER to the earlier answer, James Monroe’s Welsh roots are celebrated in an annual Welsh festival in his hometown of Frederi cksburg. It features a Welsh market, poetry contest, dancing, genealogy, storytelling, language classes and children’s activities.

Welsh music is provided by the town’s Welsh/American folk band Moch Pryderi (Pryderi’s Pigs), who have played there every year since the inauguration in 1998.

Adam Davidson, Cardiff.