Excerpt:
Natural products have been used for medicinal purposes since ancient times. These include materials from plant, animal, and mineral sources, with the majority derived from plants.
Traditions of materia medica differ among different cultures. Some are rudimentary and primarily verbal while others are extremely extensive and well documented. Examples of the former include medicine as practiced in the jungles and remote regions of Asia, Africa, Australia, and tropical America. This form of medical practice still incorporates a sizable amount of magic or witchcraft but is the one that has captured and continues to capture a major part of our attention. This is due to a number of reasons, including the following two. One, it satisfies the pioneering American spirit where one goes after something exciting that can produce headlines; the end result, which is to seek leads to effective drugs, often appears to be secondary. Two, due to the lack of easy access to non-English or non-European medicinal records, jungle medicine seems to be the only alternative for most American or Western researchers.
In contrast to the primitive practice of herbal medicine and its verbal tradition as currently found in the jungles, there are some very extensively documented medical traditions that are out of reach of most Western researchers. This is not due to a separation by physical distance, but rather by the language barrier. The most extensive and best documented source of materia medica can be found in traditional Chinese medicine. I hope this paper can serve as an introduction to this so far largely untapped resource