Understanding Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine in the 21st Century: Case-study of Longdan Xiegan Tang
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2024
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Bi-College (Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges). Department of Environmental Studies
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Dark archive until 01/01/2025. Afterwards Haverford users only
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Abstract
Traditional medicine (TM) is a fluid system of understanding the relationship of the human body, disease, and materia medica which has changed throughout centuries with the rise and fall of dynasties, empires, social reformation, and cultural revolutions. This project aims to develop a better understanding of one branch of TM, traditional Chinese herbal medicine (TCHM) in the 21st century. As the popularity of TCHM and herbal supplements are rising in more wealthy, developed countries in the West, it is important to understand the history and origins behind the development and accumulation of this knowledge. The introduction and background section explore the Orientalist and essentialist implications of official language about TM from organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO). To contextualize TM and TCHM in the 21st century, the background also describes the inability of current legal frameworks to protect traditional knowledge and medicine from exploitative practices in the post-colonial era. The second section, titled “Historical Context,” identifies some of the historical literature and classical Chinese Pharmacopeia, with a focus on Bencao Gangmu, Compendium of Materia Medica, or Great Pharmacopoeia by Li Shizhen, and discusses the process of compiling herbology and natural history. This section also describes the significant change in TCM during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1900s. The methods section describes the process of interviewing TCM practitioners, visiting and contacting local apothecaries, collecting literature, and documenting and translating interviews for this project. Lastly, the discussion section reflects on the interviews, conversations, and archival work done to acknowledge the complexity of how TCM is perceived in the 21st century due to the ongoing impacts of orientalism, essentialism, and empiricism. Additionally, Longdan Xiegan Tang (LDXGT) is used as a case-study to understand the usage of plants and plant material in TCHM, the paper describes the ethnobotany, morphology, and pharmacology of each specific component in the prescription.