The herbal anti-malarial qinghao in the pre-modern Chinese medical literature
Malaria is an ancient disease, which continues to constitute the main burden of disease in the southern hemisphere. There are only few medicinal substances against which the Plasmodium parasites, which cause different types of malarial fevers, have not yet developed resistance. Artemisinin is the most favoured one among them as it causes rapid fever clearance and has minimal side effects. In the early 1970s, it was extracted from the species Artemisia annua L. (qinghao, huanghuahao), a known traditional Chinese medical drug, inter alia used against intermittent fevers, in laboratories of the PR China. The identification of its active principle, which is a peroxide, required some ingenious chemistry, as the structure of the molecule does not resemble any other anti-malarial. Since Artemisinin cannot be synthesized in the laboratory, geneticists and agronomists are undertaking important research but research on the traditional medical drug Artemisia annua has been minimal.
This two-year project (March 2011-13), which is undertaken by Professors Wu Zhongping, Wu Dunxu and Elisabeth Hsu, is primarily practical in orientation. The aim is to publish a handbook for practical use, in Chinese and English, sourcing information from at least three different genres of the Chinese medical literature: the bencao (materia medica), fangji (formularies), yi’an (medical case histories) from 168 BCE-1949. The research also is of scholarly interest: it is the first book-length project to provide a longitudinal, text-critically analysed study of a traditional Chinese medical drug in English. During the first stage (in Shanghai) every text entry on qinghao (or its synonyms) in pre-modern prints (ca 80, pdf format) was scanned into the computer. This information, which is currently being translated, concerns observations about the plant and its growth, modes of harvesting the parts of the medicinally active aspects of the plant, and its medicinal applications, often in combinations of traditional polypharmacy.