The publication in 1774 of Sugita Genpaku (1733-1817) epochal book Kaitai shinsho (New book on anatomy) that challenged Japanese traditional understanding of the human body based on Chinese medicine by introducing the importance of anatomy in the practice of medicine gave impetus to the development of Western medicine in Japan. It marked symbolically the acknowledgment as a scholarly activity the translation of Western medical books that used to be the chasse gardée of a handful of Nagasaki interpreters, and established Edo as the new cutting edge scholarship center for Dutch studies along with Nagasaki. The publication of the Kaitai Shinsho was followed indeed by an increasing number of Japanese translations of Western medical textbooks and books recording autopsies conducted in Japan under the supervision of Japanese physicians. It was in this thriving Dutch medicine learning environment that at the turn of the nineteenth century Ishizaka Sōtetsu (1770-1841) became the leader of a new generation of acupuncturists trained both in classical Chinese medicine and Dutch medicine. Western anatomy for its similarity with ancient Chinese medicine became central to Sōtetsu’s task of recovering the true meaning of the Chinese classics and more particularly in helping him to identify the speculative theories and making the invisible parts of the Chinese conceptualized human body visible. Sōtetsu turned to Western anatomy for it helped him to question outside the stranglehold of the Ancient Formulas School paradigm the establishment and the standard sources that stood for tradition. Ishizaka Sōtetsu’s medicine did not radically break with previous Japanese medical ideas but rather was the latest development of these academic disputes that since the late seventeen century highlighted the symbolic struggles of Japanese physicians to reinterpret the textual tradition of Chinese medicine. Through the analysis of Sōtetsu’s writings on acupuncture, I aim to shed new light on how Western anatomy gave Chinese medicine educated Japanese physicians new methodological and epistemological tools to reconstruct Chinese theories into a new theoretical framework and thus allowed them to find a place in these debates that flourished in Japanese medicine since the late seventeenth century.