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A phantasmagoric pharmacopeia

By David Momphard
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, May 30, 2004, Page 18

Huang Ming-wo, shown in his traditional Chinese pharmacy, prepares medication for a patient. PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES

Earlier last week, Premier Yu Shyi-kun was castigated for having kept a rare, yellow-lined box turtle in his home. The creature is a protected species and, when lawmakers of the People First Party discovered he'd turned one over to Taipei City Zoo's wild animal protection center, they demanded that Yu be fined. It makes you wonder what the lawmakers would like done with the many pharmacists across the nation selling yellow-lined box turtles in powder form, or all the men who think taking a spoonful of it stirred into steaming water will bring them marital bliss.

Huang Ming-wo (黃明我) isn't too worried about red-faced lawmakers busting down the door of his traditional Chinese pharmacy. In fact, he claims to have a few lawmakers as clients, though he won't say who or how much powdered turtle they're buying. He's been a pharmacist for nearly four decades, but Huang sees himself more as the keeper of a flame that has burned for thousands of years.

"Yes, some animals are protected," Huang says with a shrug. "Laws are new, medicine is old."

A remedy for a common cold contains a variety of things to treat each of the patient's symptoms and some ingredients to counter-balance the effects of the main ingredients. PHOTO: DAVID MOMPHARD, TAIPEI TIMES

Where neighboring pharmacies have particleboard shelving, Huang's shop is fitted with cherry-wood drawers and shelves. His neighbors' walls are lined with plastic bottles of pills and capsules that have become the preferred form for many medicines. Huang likes his stainless steel canisters and eschews pills.

"How can you tell what's in a pill?," he asks. "You don't know if the ingredients are fresh or if they're in the correct amounts."

He still weighs his ingredients in hand scales that are mere decor in his neighbor's shops and figures prices on an abacus whose beads have been worn shiny smooth.

One of the odd things about traditional Chinese medicine is the variety of stuff that is considered medicine. Huang stocks some 2,000 ingredients in his hundreds of drawers and canisters and says he can access thousands more as he needs them. Traditional Chinese medicine makes use of over 5,000 herbs, minerals and animal parts to mix tens of thousands of prescriptions for everything from the common cold to cancer. Most of the items are so obscure to Westerners that we haven't bothered giving them a common name, only assigning them a Latin genus and species.

Just as alchemy led to metallurgy and military innovation, Taoist monks searching for immortality ultimately developed treatments and cures for a host of maladies and large amounts of snake oil.

The earliest known written record of these cures is a work called Prescriptions for 52 Diseases that was compiled some 3,000 years ago and unearthed in 1973 during the excavation of a tomb in Hunan, China. It contains 283 prescriptions, including 24 treatments for a hernia, 29 treatments for urinary problems and 42 ways to cure a carbuncle, telling us that the ancient Chinese had already accumulated a high level of knowledge, and that they suffered a lot of oozing sores.

Contemporary pharmacists refer to far more extensive works, including the Materia Medica (本草綱目), a 16th-century work that is considered the most extensive Chinese medical lexicon ever compiled by a single author and contains 11,096 prescriptions. When it was first introduced overseas in the 17th century, the Materia Medica was translated into French, German, English, Russian, Japanese and Korean.

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Materia Medica, first published in a three-volume, 3,500-page 1977 edition, builds on earlier works and is widely considered the most indispensable pharmacological reference. No other body of knowledge can tell us more about how to keep the blood thin, the joints loose and the penis erect. It bookends the shelves of pharmacies throughout China and Taiwan, including Huang's shop.

"I don't need to refer to it," Huang says. "But many of my customers like to look up different ingredients to learn more about them.

It's a boast that isn't taken lightly given the huge pharmacopeia that he works with every day. As he talks, he weighs ingredients for a client who has a cold. On his counter lie several sheets of paper piled with various barks, branches and buds. When it's taken, each pile will be added to three cups of water, boiled for several minutes, then drank. The aroma from the ingredients on the counter -- in fact, the pungent sweetness of Huang's whole shop -- led me to believe that swallowing one's medicine isn't the bitter experience it is for many Westerners.

But what of the powdered turtles and the assortment of penises from unfortunate animals that men believe will make them virile? Surely that's a hard medicine to swallow.

"There is no pleasure in drinking it," Huang says. "The pleasure comes later."

Next Sunday "Odd Jobs" looks at the job of the geomancer.

Cure-alls:

The venom from scorpions has been used to cure certain diseases like cancer and has been used in the research of treatments for nervous disorders.

Turtle's shell is believed to treat a variety of maladies, including dizziness, profuse sweating and impotence.

Another alleged cure for impotence (there are a lot) comes from sea horses, which strengthen the kidneys and liver, thereby strengthening the whole body. They are also believed to cure bed-wetting and to prevent sores from festering.

Catch a scaly anteater, skin it, dry it under the sun and boil it for a few minutes and you'll be able to remove its scales more easily. They can be used to treat anchylosis, a kind of stiffening of the joints, festering wounds, abscesses and to firm a woman's breasts after lactating.

Chinese believed in the past (some still do) that what you eat will help you with whatever problem you may have. And so penises and gonads of dogs, deer and tigers were long the culinary choice of impotent men. Children were fed pig's brain to make them smarter.

Still common, though no more proven effective, is pearl powder, which allegedly makes ladies' skin smooth and younger looking.

Still more cures for impotence and sterility come from the hairy antlers of young stags, which are also said to cure dizziness and tinnitus and to alleviate a sore back.
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