àn mó
Also rendered: pressing and rubbing (Keeps both verbs as things done by hand) · massage (The modern word; loses both halves of the compound) · working with the hands (Says what it is without the technical name) · an mo (Bare transliteration)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
Pressing and rubbing — the chapter’s prescription for numbness, the condition it attributes to a life of repeated fright and to channels that no longer get through. It is paired with medicated wine, and the pairing is the point: the rubbing works on the surface and the wine carries in, and between them they reach a trouble that neither needle nor drug taken inward is suited to. This is among the earliest appearances of the word in medical literature, and it is worth noting that the chapter gives it no special status — it is simply the method that fits the tissue.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Wiseman & Feng | pressing and rubbing | They keep the compound verbatim, which is also what the clinical literature does in English. |
| Unschuld | massage | He collapses it into the modern term, which is what a reader will recognise but is not what the text says. |
| This site | pressing and rubbing | 按 is pressing down and 摩 is grinding — two distinct actions, and the chapter's habit is to name the action rather than the profession. 'Massage' is a modern category this text would not have recognised, and it hides the fact that 摩 is the harder of the two. |
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