From the Margins to Recognition: The History of Acupuncture in Québec and Montréal

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Here’s a medicine that nearly vanished in its own country. Early in the twentieth century, a modernizing China was turning away from its needles; it was in France, oddly enough, that part of this knowledge was kept alive and passed on. From there, in the 1960s, it crossed the Atlantic to Montréal — at first on the margins, sometimes prosecuted, before climbing, decade by decade, every rung of recognition. Québec’s history of acupuncture is that ascent.

The early days in Montréal (1960s–1970s)

Early in the twentieth century, Chinese medicine came close to being abolished at home: a bill sought to ban its practice, and it was withdrawn in the face of practitioners’ mobilization. It wasn’t until after 1949 that the medicine was reorganized and institutionalized in its present form.

In the meantime, part of that knowledge had found refuge in France, where the consul Georges Soulié de Morant (1878–1955) introduced and codified it: French owes him the very word “meridian.” France thus became the West’s main relay for this medicine.

Acupuncture reached Montréal in the 1960s around Oscar Wexu, one of the last students of Soulié de Morant, who began training practitioners here and founded the first Québec association in 1972. The practice spread despite prosecutions for the “illegal practice of medicine”: in September 1973, the physicians’ professional order, then known as the Collège des médecins et chirurgiens de la province de Québec, declared acupuncture a medical act, and it won its cases in the trials of the years that followed, where fines ran to about $200 per count.

Legal recognition: from the 1985 regulation to the 1994 Act

Recognition came in three stages. In 1977, control over the practice of acupuncture was entrusted to the physicians’ professional corporation: seeing a non-physician acupuncturist then required a doctor’s note. In 1985, a first regulation, approved by décret 1299-85, allowed non-physicians to practise legally, under the supervision of that same corporation, which kept a register of acupuncturists. Only with the Loi sur l’acupuncture, assented to on June 17, 1994, did the practice become an autonomous profession: it’s that Act that created the Ordre des acupuncteurs du Québec, whose board, syndic and professional inspection took office in July 1995.

Regulated college-level training

Acupuncture training in Québec is a regulated college-level program centred on needling and on the theoretical framework of Chinese medicine; it also surveys the other branches of that medicine: dietetics, exercise (Qi Gong), massage (Tuina), and herbal medicine. That last branch remains outside the acupuncturist’s scope of practice in Québec — prescribing Chinese herbs isn’t among our acts. The program at Collège de Rosemont is the best-known example, preparing students for admission to the Ordre des acupuncteurs du Québec, which oversees the practice province-wide.

A widening place

The history of acupuncture in Québec is thus one of a gradual rise in legitimacy and integration, despite a controversial start and a struggle for official recognition. Attitudes toward complementary approaches have shifted, slowly. And the practice didn’t arrive here through legislation: it arrived through people, practitioners trained elsewhere, patients from many backgrounds, exchanges that long preceded official recognition.

Sources

The legal framework cited here can be verified against the official texts: the Loi sur l’acupuncture (RLRQ, chapter A-5.1), assented to on June 17, 1994 under the title L.Q. 1994, chapter 37, and the Code des professions (RLRQ, chapter C-26), both published on LégisQuébec. The 1985 regulation is the one approved by décret 1299-85 of June 26, 1985, which the 1994 Act itself names in section 26. The prosecutions of the 1970s are reported in the Journal des débats of the Commission permanente des corporations professionnelles for December 14, 1977. The account of the early days in Montréal follows Erin M. Reid’s master’s thesis, Needling the Spirit (McGill University, 2008), and the timeline published by the Ordre des acupuncteurs du Québec.

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