Hànyào yánjiū gāngyào 漢藥研究綱要
An Outline of Research on Chinese (Han) Drugs by 久保田晴光 (撰)
About the work
The Hànyào yánjiū gāngyào 漢藥研究綱要 (Japanese Kan’yaku kenkyū kōyō) is a Republican-era pharmacognostic and pharmacological survey of the Chinese materia medica by the Japanese pharmacologist 久保田晴光 Kubota Seimitsu 久保田晴光 (1879–1944), affiliated with the South Manchurian Railway Research Department (Mantetsu chōsabu 滿鐵調査部). The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3ec079 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The book opens (Chapter 1: 漢藥之概念 “The Concept of Chinese Drugs”) with a methodological survey of the inherited Chinese materia-medica corpus, tracing the substance-count from the 365 entries of the Shénnóng běncǎo jīng through the Liáng-period Míngyī biélù, the Táng Xīnxiū běncǎo (850 entries), the Sòng Kāibǎo běncǎo (983), the Jiāyòu běncǎo (1,812), the Zhènglèi běncǎo (1,456), the Míng Běncǎo gāngmù (1,892), and the Qing Běncǎo gāngmù shíyí of Zhào Xuémǐn (additional 700+ — the early-Qián-lóng period reign supplement to Lǐ Shízhēn). Kubota observes that the inherited substance-list is the cumulative deposit of “ancient times until now, with the substances of all regions, of folk practice, of famine-foods, of tradition,” and is not a coherent contemporary practice.
The book’s distinctive contribution is the first-hand survey of the actual Chinese pharmacy trade of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Kubota inspected the stock-lists (代表藥店之藥名單) of representative pharmacy chains in four northern Chinese cities — Fèngtiān 奉天 (Mukden, modern Shenyang), Yíngkǒu 營口, Qízhōu 祁州 (the major drug-trading entrepôt in central Hebei), and Tiānjīn 天津 (with reference also to the Tianjin customs-house’s import-export records of Chinese drugs) — and tabulated which substances were stocked in which establishments. The results are striking: each individual pharmacy stocks around 300 substances, of which approximately 80% are plant-derived; the union of all four shops’ stocks is approximately 500 substances, again with the same plant-dominance. This 500-substance figure represents the actual contemporary practice, against the 1,892+ substances of the Běncǎo gāngmù nominal canon. A separate consultation of the inventories of pharmacies in Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, and Yunnan shows that the commonly-stocked drugs are highly consistent across regions — i.e. there is in fact a near-uniform national Chinese pharmacopoeia of c. 500 substances.
The body of the work then proceeds through these c. 500 substances in pharmacognostic detail: morphological identification, source-of-supply, contemporary commercial grades and pricing, preparation methods (pàozhì 炮製), traditional therapeutic indications (with explicit citation of Shénnóng běncǎo jīng, Lǐ Shízhēn 李時珍, and the late-Qīng commentarial corpus), and — where available — the contemporary Japanese / European chemical-pharmacological literature on the active constituents.
Composition is bracketed by Kubota’s South-Manchurian field surveys (which can be approximately dated to the late 1920s and early 1930s) and the 1936 publication of the HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú; ed. Chén Cúnrén 陳存仁) in which the work was reissued for the Chinese audience. The work is one of the principal pharmacological contributions in that series and represents the Japanese-Chinese collaborative project on Chinese-drug research of the inter-war period, in which both Japanese pharmacological methodology and Chinese-pharmacy practical knowledge were combined.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language scholarship of the work specifically located.
- Mukherjee, Dilip Kumar, ed. 1991. Quality Control of Herbal Drugs. Calcutta: Manibhasha — for the modern pharmacognosy field that descends from Kubota and his contemporaries.
- Karow, Otto. 1968. Bibliographie zur ostasiatischen Pharmazie und Pharmakologie. Wiesbaden: Steiner — bibliographic survey of the Japanese-language pharmacology-of-East-Asian-medicine literature.
- Bretschneider, Emil. 1882–1895. Botanicon Sinicum. Shanghai — the European-language predecessor to Kubota’s work, providing the botanical identifications for many of the substances Kubota then commercially surveyed.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the few extant 1930s commercial-pharmacy field-survey records of north-China drug practice, and as such has documentary value beyond its pharmacological synthesis. The four pharmacies’ stock-lists, reproduced in tabular form, are historical sources for the urban-pharmacy economy of the late Republican period — a milieu otherwise mostly recoverable from indirect references in the period’s medical journals.