The Spring and Autumn Beneath the Needle

A single needle can save a life, or become the only trace left at a crime scene. During the Wei and Jin dynasties, a needle doctor dies. Two days later, his body suddenly moves, and nine needle marks lead to a baffling mystery no one can explain. Centuries later, another strange case involving needles arises at the Imperial Medical Bureau of the Tang dynasty. During the Northern Song dynasty, an official inspecting acupuncture points is found dead while a bronze acupuncture figure is being made. In the Ming dynasty, a renowned physician traces an old murder through needle marks on a corpse. And at the end of the Qing dynasty, meridians and anatomy produce completely different conclusions about the very same body. Over more than a thousand years, dynasties rise and fall, physicians never meet, and the mysteries are never the same. Yet medical records, needling techniques, and taboos passed down from one generation to the next unwittingly alter the fates of those who come after. Only when someone takes another look at these needle cases scattered throughout history do they discover that what truly transmigrates across a thousand years has never been a secret, but the judgments physicians make about the human body, again and again. **A needle reveals life and death; medical records conceal the human heart.** **Each needle falls upon an illness, a case, and a thousand years of history.**