Museum of Traditional Medicine

This guide to Hoi An's Museum of Traditional Medicine walks you through a restored townhouse built around an old healing ritual: a physician diagnosing a patient by resting three fingers on the wrist alone. You'll see the wall of small wooden drawers holding roots and dried flowers gathered from Hoi An's hinterland and from ships in the harbor, and the low table where that pulse reading took place. The guide traces how the city's heritage center assembled nearly two hundred pieces into six rooms after the practice began to fade, then follows the story upstairs into the port's mixed Vietnamese, Chinese and Western remedies.