Tag: Chinese Medicine
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Ancient remedies for modern times
Vicky Li Dallas, Texas, United States Artemisia absinthium. Found in Bērzi village near Bauska city, Latvia. Photo by AfroBrazilian, 2013, on Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0. “To a synthetic chemist, the complex molecules of nature are as beautiful as any of her other creations.” – Elias James Corey (Nobel Lecture, 1990)1 As the Vietnam…
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American ginseng as an herbal emissary influencing Qing-American trade relations
Richard Zhang Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States Panax quinquefolium, as featured in a book by physician-botanist Jacob Bigelow, late 1810s. Public domain courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. On February 22, 1784, the Empress of China set sail from New York Harbor.1 Destined for the eponymous country, the American ship carried thirty tons of a wild root—ginseng.…
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A brief history of kidney transplantation
Laura Carreras-Planella Marcella Franquesa Ricardo Lauzurica Francesc E. Borràs Barcelona, Spain We may think of renal transplantation as routine therapy today, but this procedure has taken centuries to develop and is marked by important events in the history of science. An ancient description of the kidneys is found in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, dated…
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Tu Youyou, discoverer of artemisinin for resistant malaria
Tu Youyou, Nobel Laureate in medicine in Stockholm December 2015. Photo by Bengt Nyman. December 6, 2015. The Chinese scientist Tu Youyou received the 2011 Lasker–DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for isolating a chemical agent to be used in the treatment of resistant malaria. Born in…
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There is power in the blood
Mark TanNorthwest Deanery, UK “Carne fa carne e vino fa sango” [Meat makes flesh and wine makes blood]— Italian proverb Laura was covered in blood when the paramedics arrived at her house. Her husband, in a state of shock, had gathered every available towel in the vicinity, but it seemed too little and too late.…