Chinese Medicinal Identification: An Illustrated Approach

For centuries, pharmacists and clinicians have relied on the traditional method of macroscopic identification to assess the quality and authenticity of medicinal materials. Macroscopic identification uses the naked senses to assess herbal quality, combining appearance, texture, aroma, and taste with traditional methods of fire and water testing. For the first time, this text brings this specialized discipline of knowledge to English readers using a concise, illustrated format that distills the experience of China's foremost authorities in visually rich, easy-to-understand format. Chinese Medicinal Identification: An Illustrated Approach records 429 commonly used Chinese medicinal materials (including associated medicinals), using the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2005) combined with domestic and international market investigation as a basis for determining medicinal nomenclature. For each medicinal, details are provided on nomenclature, origin, harvesting and post-harvest handling, functions and properties, macroscopic characteristics, and decoction pieces. The book can be referenced via a Chinese stroke order index, a Pinyin index, and indexes organized by Latin Pharmaceutical names and Latin binomials. This book emphasizes the experience-based differentiation of Chinese medicinal materials, which is a treasure of China's cultural heritage that has been inherited and systematized, combining the technical terms derived from experience in differentiation with a modern scientific perspective. At the same time, the authors draw upon a foundation of years of field research and experiments related to medicinal materials, synthesizing information on trade, literature, and techniques, dissecting each detail. The book visually illustrates the art and science of macroscopic identification of medicinal materials in a way that is easy to learn, easy to remember, and easy to disseminate, supplementing the insufficient state of illustrations in the current literature.