Traditional Chinese Medicine: the Origin of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese Medicine: the Origin of Traditional Chinese Medicine

There are many touching legends about the origin of traditional Chinese medicine. There are two different views in The Age of the Emperor. One is "Fu" ... I tasted hundreds of medicines and made nine stitches to save my life. The other is "the emperor is angry, tastes vegetation and guides medicine." . Su Wen's classics, materia medica and books are all salty. Huainanzi mentioned that Shennong "tasted a hundred herbs, and the water was sweet and bitter, which made people avoid it." "At this time, I encountered 70 poisons a day." "TongJian Biography" also mentioned that "Stone has a disease, and the medicine stone is unknown. Emperor Yan began to taste vegetation and tasted seventy poisons a day. " There are similar legends in other books, but generally speaking, most of them are concentrated in Fu and Shennong. Historians believe that Fu was a representative figure in the early period of animal husbandry. Shennong is a representative figure in the early agricultural period, later than Fu. Taking them as representatives of drug discovery, it shows that the origin of drugs is closely related to the emergence and development of animal husbandry and agriculture in primitive society. Many books have recorded the word "taste", which fully shows that people found drugs in the process of eating, which is what later generations call the homology of medicine and food.

In primitive society, in order to maintain life, people mainly used plants as their food source besides hunting meat. Due to the ignorance of the nature of plants and the thirst for food, poisoning reactions such as vomiting, abdominal pain and even coma will occur after eating toxic plants. Sometimes the pain will be relieved or eliminated if you accidentally eat a certain food. After several generations of long-term experience, people gradually learn to distinguish between food and inedible plants, realize which plants can be used to treat diseases, and initially accumulate some knowledge about drugs. Later, with the emergence and development of agriculture, people increased their observation and experience of plants in the process of cultivating crops, and found more botanical medicines. Due to the development of society and the progress of production, medicine has developed accordingly, and the demand for drugs is increasing day by day. The source of drugs has also developed from wild medicinal materials and wild animals to some artificially cultivated drugs and domesticated livestock, and mineral drugs have also been used. Through the accumulation of long-term experience, the knowledge of drug use has become more and more abundant, and the way people spread this knowledge has also developed from oral communication to written records, and books on drugs have appeared. Because plant medicines account for the majority of medicines, the ancients called the special book recording these medicines materia medica.

The written records about drugs can be traced back to the Western Zhou Dynasty over 0/000 BC. "Zhou Li" records the history of the Zhou Dynasty, and it has the exposition of "gathering poison for medicine" and "five flavors, five grains and five medicines to nourish its diseases". Zheng Xuan's annotation on five drugs is "five drugs, including grass, wood, insects, stones and grains", which means that drugs were classified at that time. "Zhou Li" also records that "every medicine nourishes bones with acid, tendons with softness, pulse with salt, qi with bitterness, meat with sweetness, and orifices with smoothness", indicating that the medicinal properties of various medicines can be distinguished at that time. The Book of Songs records some poems of the Western Zhou Dynasty and even the Shang Dynasty, and it is the earliest book describing traditional Chinese medicine in the existing literature in China. This book contains many animals and plants, including some medicines. As far as plant medicines are concerned, there are more than 50 kinds such as Paeonia lactiflora, Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi and Glycyrrhiza uralensis Fisch. Some of them briefly record the origin, collection and eating season. Although these drugs did not mention that they could cure diseases, later herbal books included more than 100 drugs. Although The Classic of Mountains and Seas is a book that records the products of mountains and rivers all over China, it records the sources, properties and functions of some drugs. This is a book that recorded the action of drugs earlier. The book contains more than 100 kinds of drugs, including 52 kinds of plant drugs, 67 kinds of animal drugs and 3 kinds of mineral drugs. The functions of these drugs can be divided into prevention, nourishing, seed (promoting fertility), contraception, awakening, insecticidal, toxic (poisonous rats, poisonous fish, poisonous people), detoxification, veterinary drugs and so on. These drugs can treat dozens of diseases such as internal medicine, surgery, gynecology, skin and ophthalmology. Wooden slips of the Han Dynasty unearthed in Wuwei in 1970s contain about 100 kinds of traditional Chinese medicines. There are nearly 300 prescriptions in the silk book Fifty-two Diseases unearthed in Mawangdui, including more than 240 kinds of drugs. Among them, there are plants and minerals such as mercury, pepper, astragalus, peony, licorice and scutellaria. There are twelve prescriptions in Neijing, including cuttlefish bone, madder, Alisma orientale, Pinellia ternata and other plant medicines and animal medicines. These explanations are all in the late Han dynasty, and Chinese medicine has begun to take shape, and the time is ripe to produce drug monographs.

Wine plays an important role in the origin of traditional Chinese medicine. The artificial brewing of wine is generally considered to be in the Xia Dynasty. Jiang Tong, a scholar in A Jin, said in the book "Wine Patent": "The prosperity of wine begins with emperors ... and there are endless meals. It is precisely because of this that cooked grain can be fermented into wine by itself under certain conditions." A variety of crops such as rice, wheat, cereal, millet and millet were recorded on the Oracle Bone Inscriptions unearthed in Anyang, which proved that the agricultural production in Shang Dynasty was very developed and could produce different grains. These grains provide a material basis for wine brewing. Shang Zhouwang's construction of wine ponds and meat forests described in ancient books shows that drinking has become the norm at that time. Many bronzes unearthed from Shang ruins belong to wine containers, which indirectly proves that the wine-making industry in Shang Dynasty has developed.

While drinking, people find that wine has certain medical functions. It can not only make people feel happy, relieve pain, but also play an anesthetic role. Wine can not only promote blood circulation, but also promote other drugs to play a role. With the popularization of drinking, the increase of medical knowledge and the increase of drug varieties, people have developed from simply treating diseases with wine to soaking drugs in wine to making medicinal liquor. Because of the wide application of wine in medical treatment, the ancients used "unitary" as the lower part of the word "medical". In ancient times, "unitary" and "wine" were linked together, and "unitary" itself was the pictograph of the jar. This shows that wine plays an important role in medical treatment. There is a record of "drinking" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty. According to Ban Gu's explanation in White Tiger Tong, "a wine is made by mixing the fragrance of herbs and turmeric" and "a wine is made by soaking drugs in wine". There is a description of "mash" in Neijing (mash is turbid wine and mash is sweet wine). It is believed that their function is "when evil spirits arrive, you can take them all", and taking them often can prevent diseases. Hanshu even called wine "the best of many medicines" and put wine in the first place of Chinese medicine.

On the basis of homology of medicine and food, traditional Chinese medicine decoction, also known as decoction or decoction, appeared. According to legend, Yi Yin of Shang Tang created this soup. Yi Yin, a chef in Shang Tang, was good at cooking and was later appointed as the prime minister. In the preface of A-B Classic, it is said: "Yi Yin used the talents of Yasheng as his soup." Lu Chunqiu Biography also mentioned that Yi Yin talked about medicine when talking with Shang Tang. He said: "It will take years to use the new, discard the old, make sense, continue to refine and eliminate evil." These records show that Yi Yin is not only good at cooking, but also familiar with medicine. He often uses spices such as ginger and cinnamon when cooking food, thus realizing that these spices have spicy and warm stomach functions and can treat some diseases. In the future, he will use his experience in cooking food to cook medicine and put different Chinese medicines together to cook soup. Because he knows both cooking and medicine, he may contribute to the creation of soup. According to Zi Tong Zhi Jian, benefiting Yin "makes people suffer, makes soup herbal, and makes it clear that it is cold, hot, cold, bitter, bitter, sweet and salty, but light, clear and turbid, and emphasizes the twelve meridians's ups and downs", and clearly says that he is the founder of soup. It should be pointed out that the emergence of decoction is the result of people's long-term medical practice and summing up their experience in improving medication. Yi Yin has made indelible achievements in making Chinese medicine into polyjuice potion and popularizing the application of decoction.