“During the month of June 1974, twelve U.S. specialists in chemistry, medicine, pharmacology, pharmacognosy, pharmacy, and Chinese culture visited a series of major Chinese cities for the purpose of assessing the current status of herbal pharmacology (both basic and clinical) in the People’s Republic of China.”
Michael’s Commentary: So begins this late Nixon-era publication from the National Academy of Sciences. The Red Guards were muttering off in the provinces, China was now “in”, acupuncture was being “studied” in the US and many things Chinese were now politically correct. This delegation was sent to the PRC to check out the uses of herbs within Chinese medicine, struggling to its feet after nearly a decade of intellectual and political nihilism, and it offers insights into that time and into how Western pharmaceutical folks viewed Chinese herbs. It examined in detail the verifiable effects of over 250 Chinese herbs, while missing totally the energetics of therapy. I ate the book up when it first came out, and, with so many more “correct” works since published, the TCM community seems to have forgotten this arcane but sensible first peek into Chinese Herbal Medicine.
255 pages, bookmarked Acrobat (.pdf) file – 740K