Insects used in Chinese medicine / by Bernard E. Read.

  • B. E. Read
Date:
[1940]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Insects used in Chinese medicine / by Bernard E. Read. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    applied to the dog louse-fly in China in the Ming dynasty, the bedbug being just put in as a subheading of the same monograph for the control of which people used musk, flagroot, smartweed or a horse’s hoof to keep them away. On the other hand the use of the cockroach listed in Shen Nung’s herbal is Chinese; the present-day cosmopolitan species Blatta orientalis has spread all over the world as has its uses for feverish chills and amenorrhoea as cited later by Dioscorides and the Arabs. Similarly with locusts and ground beetles which were extensively eaten in the S.W. and south China. Or one may consider the pill-bug also of the uPen Ching” and its use as a diuretic and for malaria which Dioscorides and the Arabs used for the same purpose and which was continued all through the centuries so that with the exception of cantharides it was the only one to survive in Western Pharmacopoeias at the beginning of last century. One finds it quoted in the “Edinburgh New Dispensatory” 1796, for anuria, whooping cough, weak sight, jaundice, etc. The original Chinese setting is clear in such details as 14 (2x7) woodlice with an equal number of pickled soybeans for malaria. Old Mythology. It is appropriate here to consider briefly some of the myths associated with insects, for they are often the key to origin. For instance one definitely assumes a Taoist origin to the idea that a dose of the Ping Yi Fairy Pills containing spiders and leeches will enable one to live under water or that spiders fed on lard, killed and smeared on the feet will enable one to walk on the surface of water. Flowers, leaves and women’s petticoats under the influence of the air and wind change into butterflies. It is said the maternal instinct of one of the water-beetles is so strong that if you take tw7o lots of money and smear the blood of the female insects on one lot and the eggs on the other, when the first lot of money is spent it comes back to the owner overnight and can be thus used an indefinite number of times. The Herbal naively remarks this kind of insect is very scarce and hard to find. The diving-beetle is said to cross the road every 12th day on the rfi days of the month and hence is called kuo chieh, and is said to inter-breed with tiger-moths. They are used for diseases of obstruc¬ tion in the bowels and circulation, and are given to children to stop night crying with stomachache. Locusts are said to live and inter¬ breed with earthworms, they sing down the wind and the earthworms are said to sing upwind and through the wind they interbreed. The locusts and closely related grass-hoppers are used for love potions taken internally or just carried in the pocket. These, and one might cite many more, are all of Chinese origin associated with Chinese mythology. Comparative Therapeutic Uses. The therapeutic uses might be discussed to show foreign in¬ fluences. The scarab or dung-beetle was used as an amulet in old Egypt and in old Greece. For quartan malaria a live insect was put in a red bag and hung around the neck. This is cast in a Chinese mold
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