[The development of integrated Chinese and western medicine in recent 5 decades]

Traditional Chinese medicine was excluded from the governmental system in the Republican period since its establishment. The work of integrating Chinese and western medicine in Taiwan only got its real development until 1958. The founding of the China Medical College in the private sector is considered to be a milestone of the development of integrative medicine in Taiwan. It provided students with practical understanding of both Chinese and western medicine, but achieved little in regard to integrating the two medical systems. In the beginning years, students in the Department of the Medicine in China Medical College actually majored in both Chinese and western medicine. A representative physician of this period is Yun Zi-yu, who was educated at China Medical College. It was not until 1980 when the China Medical College Hospital was founded, the integration of the Chinese and Western medicine began to carry out and take shape within a well-organized clinical field in certain scale. For over 3 decades since its establishment, the Hospital was founded, the executing level of the integration of both medical systems has been gradually descended with different tiers of its executive levels, viz., from the "Chinese and Western Medicine Cooperation Hospital" through the "Center for Integrative Chinese and Western Medicine", to the "Department of Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine". In the same period, more departments of Chinese medicine were set up in the teaching hospitals, private and public, in Taiwan, and the interaction and mutual cooperation of the Chinese and western medicine has been mainly practiced through clinical consultation and research projects.