History of Chinese Herbal Medicine

Chinese herbal medicine has been widely used to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases. It largely consists of natural medicines and produced ones, namely medicines made from herbal, animal, mineral, some chemical substance and biological substance. The invention and application of Chinese medicine has a history of thousand of years. Yet the word "Chinese medicine" appeared only after western medicine was introduced into China, which aimed to make a difference between the two.

History of Chinese Herbal Medicine

Chinese history once told a fiction of a person named Shen Nong who tasted many herbs at the same time and was then poisoned. It told us what difficult times that ancient Chinese people had when discovering the medicines.

Dating back to the period around 22 century B.C. to 256 B.C (in which China was in Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasty), there appeared alcohol medicine and soup medicine. A book, The Book of Songs (or Shi Jing) in the Zhou Dynasty (11 century B.C. to 771 B.C.), wrote something about medicine. This is the earliest existing book bearing records of ancient Chinese medicine. Another book, Nei Jing, which is the earliest existing book on Chinese medicine theory, proposed the theories like "cooling the patient if one had high temperature and vice versa", "adding the five flavors into the medicine and one would feel bitter inside and have diarrhea. These formed the basis of Chinese medicine theory.

The earliest existing book on Chinese herbal medicine, Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (Ben means root and Cao means shoot), was written in the Qin and Han Dynasty (221 B.C.-220A.D.) based on the work of medical experts who collected lots of materials before the Qin Dynasty. The book recorded 365 types of medicine, some of which is still used in contemporary clinics. This book set up a beginning of the establishment of eastern medicine.

In the Tang Dynasty (618 A.D.-907 A.D.), economy prospered, which boosted the eastern medicine. The Tang government wrote the book, Tang Ben Cao, which is the earliest existing book in the world on pharmacopeia. This book included 850 types of medical herbs and their pictures, which further improved the scale of eastern medicine.

In the Ming Dynasty (1368 A.D.- 1644 A.D.), an expert of herbal medicine Li Shizhen spent 27 years accomplishing the book, Ben Cao Gang Mu. The book recorded 1,892 types of herbal medicine, making it the greatest book in Chinese history, which included the most type of herbal medicines.

After the founding of New China in 1949, plenty of researches have been done in various fields such as botany, identification science, chemistry, pharmacology and clinical medicine. These researches provide scientific basis to identify the source and authenticity of herbal medicines as well as their function scheme. Later, a nationwide survey was done on the source of the medicine, which helped produced the book, Zhong Yao Zhi in 1961. In 1977, the book, Herbal Medicine Dictionary, was publicized, which brought the number of recorded herbal medicine to 5,767. In addition, reference books, treatise, newspaper and magazines on Chinese medicine were publicized. There also established institutions on scientific research, teaching and producing of Chinese medicine.