Abstract: In the mid-19th century, Western medical missionaries such as John G. Kerr focused their criticism on traditional Chinese medicine in foreign journals, not with the aim of objectively exchanging and comparing Chinese and Western medicine, but with the aim of stigmatizing traditional Chinese medicine with a sense of Western colonial superiority and spreading Christianity in China. On the one hand, John G. Kerr criticized traditional Chinese medicine as unscientific and backward and advocated the advancement of Western medicine; on the other hand, he drew on the application of Chinese herbal medicine to provide cover for his medical missionary foothold and infiltration in China. The two-sided nature of this behavior hindered the spread of modern traditional Chinese medicine to the West and weakened the discursive power of traditional Chinese medicine, which had an adverse effect on the survival and development of modern traditional Chinese medicine.