This thesis paper will attempt to analyze the interaction of Chinese and Western medicines throughout the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, pain management will be used as a framework for understanding these interactions, especially in light of how anesthesia and post-operative pain relief methods were developed separately and then in tandem with these bodies of medicine. How can the evolution of Chinese medicine as it came in contact with Western medicine in the twentieth century help us to understand the culmination of medicine interactions such as acupuncture anesthesia in the 1970's? In looking at the late nineteenth century (both in the West and in China), the Republican period in China, the Communist Revolution of 1949 in China, and the significant decade of US-China rapprochement in the 1970's, an investigation of pain management and how Chinese medicine and Western medicine interacted is conducted. Chinese medicine has been favorably adaptive in relation to its traditional history and how it amalgamated with Western science, and there are aspects of Chinese medicine that should be incorporated into Western medical systems today.