China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Time in Chinese alchemy
Published in Vivienne Lo, Michael Stanley-Baker, Dolly Yang, Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022
The Greater Celestial Circuit. The operation of the two contrasting sequences mentioned above results, after repeated cycles (sometimes said to be 300 or 360), in the formation of the Internal Medicine (neiyao 內藥). As soon as it is formed, the Internal Medicine should be conjoined with the External Medicine in order to generate the Great Medicine (dayao 大藥) in the lower Cinnabar Field. The Great Medicine is also called ‘Mother of the Elixir’ (danmu 丹母). After a further seven days of refining (called ‘entering the enclosure’, or ruhuan 入環), it conceives the Embryo (tai 胎).5
Tattooing in Vitiligo
Published in Vineet Relhan, Vijay Kumar Garg, Sneha Ghunawat, Khushbu Mahajan, Comprehensive Textbook on Vitiligo, 2020
The most commonly used tattoo pigment is iron oxide, which can give different shades of light brown, dark brown, camel yellow and black, depending upon the shades of the constitutional skin tone and complexion of the normal skin to which it needs to be matched. However, good matching of the tattooed skin may be achieved at the time of tattooing but it tends to become grayish blue with time. In addition, iron oxide yellow color can be obtained by using cadmium oxide, while white titanium oxide can be used to mix and match various shades required with iron oxide. Cinnabar and mercuric sulfate are red pigments which can also be used to obtain various shades by mixing and matching. The red pigments, however, have more allergenic potential than others, and iron oxide is the most versatile pigment as it can give various shades and has the least sensitizing potential [5].
How to read a recipe?
Published in Ulrike Steinert, Systems of Classification in Premodern Medical Cultures, 2020
In section B, first, a list of the materia medica is given (namely of 9, 6, 5, 8 and 8 different materia medica). Interestingly, this list comprises in each formula, first, the ‘twig’ (as pharmaceutical substance) of between three to five different kinds of orchard trees (section B1). It then lists two pairs of pungent materia medica, one of them qing hao (section B2). Instructions of preparation follow (section C). They always involve the use of children’s urine (although this materia medica is only occasionally listed in section B), followed by precise instructions of chopping, heating, reducing, removing, bringing to the boiling point, filtering and the like. Finally, in sections D, E, F, all five formulae recommend the use of three recurrent materia medica: cinnabar, betel nut and musk, which are to be administered at intervals in the early morning before dawn. They are said to have the effect of ‘expelling’ or ‘flushing out’ or ‘down’ chong 蟲, worms. This is so far in line with Chinese medical knowledge today, as both musk and cinnabar are thought to affect the heart channel, both by alerting the senses and by calming the mind, while betel nut, which is astringent, bitter and warming, is known to kill parasites in the stomach and large intestine, and by leading them downward helps expel them (Bensky et al. 2004: 1008).
Nephrotoxicity induced by natural compounds from herbal medicines – a challenge for clinical application
Published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, 2022
Jinqiu Rao, Ting Peng, Na Li, Yuan Wang, Caiqin Yan, Kai Wang, Feng Qiu
Aristolochic acid nephropathy (ACN) is a rapidly developing interstitial kidney disease that first appeared in the public in 1993 after a young Belgian woman took a herbal diet drug adulterated with aristolochic acid (AA) and caused renal failure (De Broe 1999). Although most countries prohibit or restrict the sale and use of products containing AA caused by a variety of herbs and products has been still reported all over the world (Vaclavik et al. 2014). The unintentional long-term consumption of food contaminated with AA can cause Balkan endemic nephropathy (BEN) (De Broe 2012). Researchers believed BEN patients may have been poisoned by eating food made from flour contaminated with the seeds of the Aristolochia plant family (Jelaković et al. 2015). Some crops can absorb and bioaccumulate AA from soil and water where Aristolochia species grow (Gruia et al. 2018). In addition to AA, many other components of HMs can cause nephrotoxicity. In 2009, a 29-year-old man developed acute renal failure after taking Euphorbia paralias, a drug that is used to treat edema. Despite that Glycyrrhiza glabra is one of the most popular HMs, a 65-year-old woman developed hypertension with sodium retention, edema, hypokalemia, metabolic alkalosis, low plasma aldosterone, and low renin activity after taking Glycyrrhiza granules for six months (Ronovan Ottenbacher 2015). Aloe with aloe-emodin as the main component is used as a component additive in various foods and cosmetics, while it was clinically indicated that the intake of aloe preparations may be related to renal failure (Dong et al. 2020). Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F is a well-known HM for its various pharmacological activities, especially anti-inflammatory, anti-virus, and antioxidant activities (Zhang et al. 2021). However, severe renal tubular inflammatory cell infiltration, renal tubular epithelial cell degeneration, and necrosis were found in renal biopsy in clinical cases of patients with nephropathy caused by Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F (Luo et al. 2018). Cinnabar is mainly known for treating insomnia and epilepsy. Long-term use of cinnabar accumulated mercury in the kidney, resulting in renal tubule damage and renal interstitial fibrosis (Wang, Wang, et al. 2015). According to available data, more than 100 kinds of herbal constituents, including organic acids, alkaloids, anthraquinones, flavonoids, terpenoids, phenylpropanoids, glycosides, and minerals all have renal toxicity (Xu et al. 2020).
What Sherlock sorely missed: the EVA technology for cultural heritage exploration
Published in Expert Review of Proteomics, 2019
Pier Giorgio Righetti, Gleb Zilberstein, Alfonsina D’Amato
Prior to his death Casanova wrote his famous Memoirs (Histoire de ma Vie), which are archived at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. His autobiography is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life in the 18th century and is also regarded as a literary masterpiece of that epoch. In 1785 he became the librarian to Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, a chamberlain of the emperor, in the Castle of Dux, Bohemia. A few years later, in 1789, he began in earnest to write his Memoirs, as ‘the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying of grief’. The first draft was completed by July 1792, and he spent the next six years revising it. His autobiography was still being compiled at the time of his death, his account having reached only the summer of 1774. A letter by him in 1792 states that he was reconsidering his decision to publish them, believing that his story was despicable and he would make enemies by writing the truth about his affairs. But he decided to proceed, using initials instead of actual names of the persons appearing in the book and toning down the strongest passages. He wrote in French instead of Italian because ‘the French language is more widely known than mine’. His opus is monumental: in their original publication, the memoirs were divided into twelve volumes, and the unabridged English translation by W. R. Trask runs to more than 3,500 pages. In his adventurous life he mentions he had love affairs with 122 women and girls. These adventures claimed a price, i.e. sexual diseases. He candidly admits in his Memoirs that he had several bouts of gonorrhea, the first one occurring early in his life, at the first sexual intercourse at the age of thirteen. As we did in our previous analyses of the writing of Bulgakov [19], of the pages of the death registries of the Milano’s plague of 1630 [22] and on Chekhov’s shirt [20], we assumed that, by exploring the surface of the original manuscript, we might be able to find traces of the pestiferous gonorrhea bacterium that accompanied him for most of his life. The data gleaned have just been published in Electrophoresis, in a special issue dedicated to bio-analysis [28]. Although potential traces of his pathology could not be detected, we do have data on the presence of substantial traces (reaching 0.04mg/kg, i.e. 20 times higher than background levels) of HgS in the pages of his manuscript (Figure 8). This chemical compound, known also as cinnabar, had been used, in medieval painting, as a red pigment to produce the red colour vermillion. Yet, in the XVIII century, its use was not any longer as a pigment but as a medicament, of wide diffusion, to cure sexual diseases, in particular gonorrhea. This pathology was indeed very common among the European population; risks of capturing this infection were quite high in love affairs. Thus our findings indicated that, at the time of this writing, Casanova had likely had a relapse of this pathology and was curing it by using mercury sulphide, whose powder was spilled, in minute amounts, also on the page surfaces (in those days the high toxicity of this metal in human beings was not known!).