e four classes of Masters, attached to its two High Medical Chiefs:
Masters of Medicine, of Acupuncture, of Manipulation, and two Masters
for Frustration by means of Spells.

Soothsaying and exorcism may be traced far back to the fifth and sixth
centuries B.C.

In times of epidemic the specialists of Wu-ism, who act as seers,
soothsayers and exorcists, engage in processions, stripped to the waist,
dancing in a frantic, delirious state, covering themselves with blood by
means of prick-balls, or with needles thrust through their tongues, or
sitting or stretching themselves on nail points or rows of sword edges.
In this way they frighten the spectres of disease. They are nearly
all young, and are spoken of as "divining youths," and they use an
exorcising magic based on the principle that legions of spectres prone
to evil live in the machine of the world. (De Groot, VI, 983-985.)

The Chinese believe that it is the Tao, or "Order of the Universe,"
which affords immunity from evil, and according to whether or no the
birth occurred in a beneficent year, dominated by four double cyclical
characters, the horoscope is "heavy" or "light." Those with light
horoscopes are specially prone to incurable complaints, but much harm
can be averted if such an individual be surrounded with exorcising
objects, if he be given proper amulets to wear and proper medicines to
swallow, and by selecting for him auspicious days and hours.

Two or three special points may be referred to. The doctrine of the
pulse reached such extraordinary development that the whole practice
of the art centred round its different characters. There were scores
of varieties, which in complication and detail put to confusion the
complicated system of some of the old Graeco-Roman writers. The basic
idea seems to have been that each part and organ had its own proper
pulse, and just as in a stringed instrument each chord has its own tone,
so in the human body, if the pulses were in harmony, it meant health; if
there was discord, it meant disease. These Chinese views reached
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there is a very
elaborate description of them in Floyer's well-known book.(27) And the
idea of harmony in the pulse is met with into the eighteenth century.

(27) Sir John Floyer: The Physician's Pulse Watch, etc.,
London, 1707.

Organotherapy was as extensively practiced in China as in Egypt. Parts
of organs, various secretions an