On 07/06/2011 01:23 PM, nemesis wrote:

> BTW, some times japanese manga comes up with some interesting thoughts.  I read
> in Blade of the Immortal a suggestion that europeans had quite a better grasp on
> medicine as opposed to the traditional chinese medicine because they had quite
> good knowledge of the human body and its inner workings for all the centuries
> worth of painful and barbaric tortures and death penalties.  Europeans were
> making surgery while chinese were still drinking bitter tea.
>
> I'm sure there was plenty of torture in china too, but while europeans were
> cracking open bodies and letting them rot in public places during the dark ages,
> china was in the height of a sophisticated civilization.  Death penalties were
> usually carried out quickly rather than in agony.

I heard QI assert that the invention of china held China back 
technologically for several centuries. The gist of it being that since 
they had china cups to drink out of, they didn't develop glass, so they 
didn't have sophisticated optical lenses, nor high-temperature furnaces 
for smelting iron, etc. Or something like that. (I can't remember off 
the top of my head whether it was china, paper or tea, but it was 
something innocuous like that.)

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