Medicine and The New Year's Sacrifice Comparison

This works include those written during the existence of the late Qing dynasty to more modern revolutions of the communists in 1949 by Lu Hsun in his stories Medicine and New Year’s Sacrifice. Through medicine he is a revolutionist against political and medical practices in China. In the New Year’s sacrifice a woman revolts against cultural practices that are against her personal beliefs. Traditional Chinese culture surprises thought and reasoning, this in turn causes China to be a poor, backward nation. There is then a need to revolt against these forms of traditional or rather ‘primitive’ believes. He left medicine with the drive that the whole of China was supposed to be rid off ills that were spiritual rather than the ills that were physical.

In 1909, Lu Xun later went back to China for work and teaching. Following this event, he went ahead to write what was to become his first short stories which he gave the title Diary of a Madam. With the subsequent success of his first story, he consequently wrote other stories titled Wandering and A Call To Arms. His stories seem to portray the traditional setting of Chinese culture and villages. 49- 58) The short story of medicine was published in the month of May in the year 1919. The story was about a young boy who contracts the deadly disease of tuberculosis. His parents are very desperate to find a cure for their son. They put their trust in a popular Chinese myth that human blood was a guaranteed cure for those infected with tuberculosis.

“A guaranteed cure! Eaten warm like this. At a young age, Xun would sell some of the family valuables in order to obtain expensive pieces of Chinese medicines and herbs. He mainly procured the medicines and herbs that would be difficult to obtain such as roots of the reeds that were gathered during the periods of winter and some Japanese herbal seeds. He remained to be an individual with skeptical attitudes towards Chinese medicine and government administrations. New Year’s Sacrifice (Lau, 1981, p. - 240) In the short story of New Year's Sacrifice, Lu Xun talks of a woman who goes through extreme pain and shows how it ends up affecting her in later years of her life and the fears she develops about how shell be affected in the afterlife to come.

The events the woman goes through in her life after finally giving into marriage cause her to be physically and mentally shuttered. She is again faced with the deaths of her son and her second husband which causes people to refer to her as an outcast superstitiously. In these two short stories, myths, and misconceptions can cause an individual to limit their reasoning and cognitive capabilities. They also show that there is also a side or rather parties of individuals who will try and revolt against these kinds of cultural ideals. The stories express how traditional concepts about events or experiences have limited the mind of human beings particularly the people of China. Works Cited Dimache, Alexandru, Amare Wondirad, and Elizabeth Agyeiwaah.