Acupressure

摘要

It may surprise some readers to know that acupressure was in use in 19th-century England. The term, which bears little resemblance to that in use today, defined a technique in which bleeding was arrested using needles. Known today primarily for introducing chloroform,1 the obstetrician James (later Sir James) Young Simpson (1811–1870) devised the procedure as a means of avoiding the pitfalls of ligatures to tie severed blood vessels. Described by Simpson for the first time to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1859, acupressure excited widespread interest.2