A phantasmagoric pharmacopeia

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."

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.