Ancient Chinese medicine and its modern interpretation / by Bernard E. Read.

  • Read, B. E. (Bernard Emms), 1887-1949.
Date:
[1939]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ancient Chinese medicine and its modern interpretation / by Bernard E. Read. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    5/22 (page 1)
    MODERN INTERPRETATION By Bernard E. Read of the Henry Lester Institute of Medical Research, Shanghai. To give a modem interpretation to ancient medicine one should first consider its character and its claims. The Character of Ancient Chinese Medicine. A student of this subject is impressed probably most of all by the fact that the theories of disease and the drugs used in treatment are for the most part not peculiarly Chinese but were or are in common usage throughout the world in all the old civilizations. Over 26 per cent of the plants listed in the Chinese medical classic, the Pen-t’sao Kang-mu (* ^ $P3 id ) are identical with those found in Indian materia medica.1 A similar great range of animal drugs existed in the sixteenth century in European materia medica, which is now practically non¬ existent. The use of mineral drugs and the practice of Chinese alchemy with the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of immortality is Europe in the middle ages. Contacts between nations through the centuries have been so numerous that for the most part in speaking of ancient Chinese medicine one is presenting the general story of the history of world medicine. The History of Medicine. Pagel divides the history of ancient medicine into three periods: (a) the prehistoric medicine of primi¬ tive people, up to 4500 b.c.; (b) the medicine of older civilizations, to 600 b.c; and (<r) the classical period of the Greeks and Romans 600 b.c. to a.d. 130. These he follows with a Middle period up to a.d. 1500, and a Modern period a.d. 1500 to the present day. This is obviously a chronological record of European medicine, which loses a great deal by placing dates instead of names to the periods con¬ cerned. The various civilizations tell the same story of man’s 1 “A Comparison of the Materia Medica of India and China,” B. E. Read, Lingnan Sc. ]., 1929, 8, 423.