Zhōngguó Yào Yībǎizhǒng zhī Huàxué Shíyàn 中國藥一百種之化學實驗
Chemical Experiments on One Hundred Chinese Drugs by 中尾萬三 (Nakao Manzō 中尾萬三, 1879–1947, 昭和)
About the work
The Chūgoku-yaku hyakushu no kagaku jikken is the principal Japanese chemical-analytical survey of major Chinese drugs of the 1920s–30s. Nakao took 100 commercially-important substances of the contemporary Chinese drug market — drugs that he had personally observed in his Mukden and Tianjin pharmacognostic surveys — and submitted each to a standardised laboratory protocol: extraction with ether, then methanol, then water on a Soxhlet apparatus, followed by acid / base / strong base partitioning of the ether extract, with the resulting fractions submitted to qualitative chemical tests (alkaloid reagents, terpene and steroid tests, glycoside tests, phenolic tests, etc.).
This was one of the most thorough pre-WWII laboratory surveys of the Chinese pharmacopoeia. Nakao did not himself perform structural elucidation of the active principles — that was the work of the next generation, specifically the post-war Japanese-Chinese joint extraction programmes of the 1950s–60s that produced the structure of ephedrine, artemisinin, and many others. What Nakao did do was establish which drugs were chemically promising for further investigation: drugs that yielded alkaloid-positive fractions, drugs that yielded crystallisable terpenes, drugs whose chemistry was clearly distinctive from other members of the same nominal class. The work was therefore an important roadmap for subsequent East Asian phytochemistry.
The book is in the same series of Japanese 1920s–30s laboratory-pharmacological investigations of Chinese drugs as Mineshita’s 峰下鐵雄 Lùróng monograph (KR3ec081), Sugimoto’s 杉本重利 Niúhuáng monograph (KR3ec082), and Kubota’s 久保田晴光 Hànyào kōyō market-survey (KR3ec079). Together these works constitute the Japanese colonial-pharmacological scholarship on the Chinese pharmacopoeia of the interwar period.
Prefaces
The local repository preserves the body. The frontmatter file is present and includes Nakao’s methodological introduction.
Abstract
Nakao Manzō (中尾萬三, 1879–1947), Japanese pharmacist, pharmacologist, and historian of East Asian pharmacology. See his person note. Nakao is one of the most distinguished 20th-century Japanese scholars of East Asian pharmacology; alongside the laboratory work in this volume he produced important historical-philological studies of the Běnjīng tradition, the Honzō wamyō KR3ec072, and the Shōsōin pharmacological collections.
The work’s significance is as a roadmap for subsequent East Asian phytochemistry — the laboratory survey identifying which Chinese drugs had the most distinctive chemical profiles and were therefore the most promising targets for structural elucidation. Many of the drugs Nakao flagged in this 1930s survey became the subjects of the major post-war Japanese-Chinese phytochemical research programmes.
Translations and research
- Liu, Michael Shiyung. 2009. Prescribing Colonization. AAS.
- Sneader, Walter. 2005. Drug Discovery: A History. Wiley.
- No modern critical edition; no Western-language translation.
Links
- Wikipedia (ja): 中尾万三.
- 中國藥一百種之化學實驗 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB