Oriental Materia Medica - A Concise Guide

From time to time for the past 2000 years. Chinese scholars have compiled botanical registers known as pen tsao, listing the varieties and applications of medicinal herbs in current use. The herbs so listed have grown in number from 365 (Han dynasty, A.D. 25) to 1894 (Ming dynasty, 1590), although the number in relatively common use today is considerably less than 1000. In the true spirit of this magnificent pen tsao tradition, pharmacognosist Hong-yen Hsu and his associates have compiled a register of 768 Chinese herbs, combining historical modes of defining their properties and effects on the human system with reports on the most recent developments in botanical and biochemical research into their structures and actions. The knowledge accumulated over two millenia, both in traditional clinical practice and in the modern laboratory, is thus brought together in a concise and convenient format.

Each herb is identified and indexed in five different ways : by its botanical name, by its pharmaceutical name, by its Chinese name in both Wade-Giles and pin-yin transliterations, and by its common name in English. The Concise Guide thus offers a register of Chinese medicinal herbs that is unprecedented in the pen tsao tradition for its thoroughness and easy accessibility, and one that constitutes an indispensable resource for the study and practice of traditional Chinese medicine.