“Excuse me, but acupuncture and herbs can’t help you there,” he said, with a laugh. “But there are some health problems where these therapies may be beneficial, and, hence, I’m not against it when someone uses it.”

At times, Dr. Unschuld almost seems perplexed that his field of study actually became an alternative source of medical treatment. He said Chinese medicine’s popularity in the West can trace its roots to the Cold War, to 1971 to be exact. That is when James Reston, a columnist for The New York Times, reported about how he was treated in China for a burst appendix, in part with acupuncture and mugwort.

This was during the Kissinger-Nixon rapprochement with China, and the start of China’s decades-long reopening to the outside world. Chinese medicine became part of the country’s allure. Soon came the visit to Dr. Unschuld from Mr. Quinn, the C.I.A. agent; the opening of Chinese medical schools in the West; and a flood of books and translations about the exotic-sounding healing arts from the Orient.

Dr. Unschuld’s interest in medicine was not entirely unique in his family. His great-grandfather had treated the king of Belgium and other European nobility. Dr. Unschuld says he grew up in a household filled with vases and other chinoiserie donated by grateful patients. His father had been a pharmacist who collected pharmaceutical artifacts and pharmacopoeias of past centuries.

Initially, Dr. Unschuld earned a degree in pharmacy in Munich along with his wife, Ulrike. But he had also been fascinated with foreign languages and had completed a parallel track in Chinese studies. In 1969, before what he assumed would be a career in the pharmaceutical industry, the couple went to Taiwan for a year to improve their Chinese language skills.

Instead, Dr. Unschuld spent the year interviewing medical practitioners. The resulting Ph.D. thesis started his career as an expert on Chinese medicine, and for 20 years he headed the Institute for the History of Medicine at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University.

His purely academic approach, however, makes him a difficult figure for China to embrace. While widely respected for his knowledge and translations, he has done little to advance the government’s agenda of promoting Chinese medicine as soft power. Echoing other critics, he describes China’s translations of the classics as “complete swindles,” saying they are done with little care and only a political goal in mind.