Therapeutic uses of animal biles in traditional Chinese medicine: an ethnopharmacological, biophysical chemical and medicinal review.

Forty-four different animal biles obtained from both invertebrates and vertebrates (including human bile) have been used for centuries for a host of maladies in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) beginning with dog, ox and common carp biles approximately in the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046-256 BCE). Overall, different animal biles were prescribed principally for the treatment of liver, biliary, skin (including burns), gynecological and heart diseases, as well as diseases of the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and throat. We present an informed opinion of the clinical efficacy of the medicinal uses of the different animal biles based on their presently known principal chemical components which are mostly steroidal detergent-like molecules and the membrane lipids such as unesterified cholesterol and mixed phosphatidylcholines and sometimes sphingomyelin, as well as containing lipopigments derived from heme principally bilirubin glucuronides. All of the available information on the ethnopharmacological uses of biles in TCM were collated from the rich collection of ancient Chinese books on materia medica held in libraries in China and United States and the composition of various animal biles was based on rigorous separatory and advanced chemical identification techniques published since the mid-20(th) century collected via library (Harvard's Countway Library) and electronic searches (PubMed and Google Scholar). Our analysis of ethnomedical data and information on biliary chemistry shows that specific bile salts, as well as the common bile pigment bilirubin and its glucuronides plus the minor components of bile such as vitamins A, D, E, K, as well as melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine) are salutary in improving liver function, dissolving gallstones, inhibiting bacterial and viral multiplication, promoting cardiac chronotropsim, as well as exhibiting anti-inflammatory, anti-pyretic, anti-oxidant, sedative, anti-convulsive, anti-allergic, anti-congestive, anti-diabetic and anti-spasmodic effects. Pig, wild boar and human biles diluted with alcohol were shown to form an artificial skin for burns and wounds one thousand years ago in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). Although various animal biles exhibit several generic effects in common, a number of biles appear to be advantageous for specific therapeutic indications. We attempt to understand these effects based on the pharmacology of individual components of bile as well as attempting to identify a variety of future research needs.

[The chapter De Puero virgine (or de homine) of Liber medicinae ex animalibus by Sextus Placidus. Historical study, new critical edition and translation]. / El capítulo De Puero virgine (o de homine) del Liber medicinae ex animalibus de Sexto Plácido estudio, nueva edición crítica y traducción.

The article offers an historical study, a new critical edition and the translation of the chapter De Puero virgine of Liber medicinae ex animalibus by Sextus Placitus, firstly edited by Sigerist and Howald in 1927. The book, dating to Late Antiquity, is part of a phyto -zootherapeutical corpus, trasmitted by the manuscript tradition in a single block of text whose central axis is represented by the Herbarium by Pseudo-Apuleius, the tractatus De herba vettonica attributed to Antonius Musa and the De taxone. Chapter 17 is devoted to pharmacological recipes whose ingredients are organic or human body parts; here is provided a critical edition based on the collation of three texts in the manuscript tradition, well testifying the particular vitality of medical prescription texts in Late Antiquity.

[When no doctor is on call. Medical works for lay persons in late antiquity]. / Wenn kein Arzt erreichbar ist - Medizinische Literatur für Laien in der Spatantike.

The article offers a survey of the chief medical texts for lay persons in Latin, followed by a more detailed discussion of two examples, hare's brain for teething troubles and remedies for nosebleed.

Hormones and the Bolsheviks: from organotherapy to experimental endocrinology, 1918-1929.

The discipline of endocrinology emerged over roughly the same period in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere, and its practitioners across the world shared research practices and agendas to a considerable degree. Yet the discipline's institutions, networks, and social practices were firmly embedded in the particular social fabric of concrete locales, and they were built on specific local traditions, resources, and patronage. Through analysis of the origins and early progress of Soviet endocrinology, this essay uncovers numerous factors and multiple actors involved with the institutional development of the discipline in the first decade of Bolshevik rule. As elsewhere in the world, the medicinal use of animal tissue extracts--organotherapy--paved the way for wide acceptance of the ideas of the nascent science of endocrinology by both the Soviet medical community and the general public. Organotherapy also supplied the new discipline with "seed" institutions, technologies, and personnel--the veterinarian Iakov Tobolkin and the therapist Vasilii Shervinskii. But the specific institutional, political, economic, and ideological landscape of Soviet Russia shaped the discipline in a particular way.

The medicalisation of male menopause in America.

The topic of male menopause occupied space on the medical radar screen from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s, then virtually disappeared for the next four decades, until the late 1990s. By contrast, articles on this subject appeared in American popular magazines and newspapers at a consistent, if low-level, rate throughout the same period. This essay describes how the male menopause became medicalised, not by the driving forces of academic researchers and influential clinicians, but instead by a model perpetuated by lay people and medical popularisers. A medicalised conceptualisation of the body and the life-cycle had become widespread by the second half of the twentieth century, as Americans grew accustomed to regarding their lives through the lens of medicine. People came to expect medicine to provide a cure for any ailment; in the wake of the development of the so-called wonder drugs, no affliction seemed beyond medical and pharmaceutical intervention. A medicalised model had also been effectively produced for understanding and treating the menopause in women; a parallel, if not identical, stage in the life-course of men seemed reasonable. This framework, rather than persuasive evidence from the research laboratory or clinic, helped to medicalise male menopause and provided the basis for its eventual pharmaceuticalisation at the end of the twentieth century.

Kraepelin's 'lost biological psychiatry'? Autointoxication, organotherapy and surgery for dementia praecox.

Kraepelin believed that a chronic metabolic autointoxication, perhaps arising from the sex glands, eventually caused chemical damage to the brain and led to the symptoms of dementia praecox. The evolution of Kraepelin's autointoxication theory of dementia praecox is traced through the 5th to 8th (1895 to 1913) editions of his textbook, Psychiatrie. The historical context of autointoxication theory in medicine is explored in depth to enable the understanding of Kraepelin's aetiological assumption and his application of a rational treatment based on it--organotherapy. A brief account of the North American reception of Kraepelin's concept of dementia praecox, its autotoxic basis, and the preferred American style of rational treatment--surgery--concludes the discussion.

Emergence of the concept of endocrine function and endocrinology.

Endocrinology as a scientific discipline is relatively new. The term "hormone" was introduced in 1905, and "endocrinology" was introduced in 1909. However, its origins are ancient and rooted in the millennia-old practice of organotherapy, from its archaic religious beginnings, through early attempts to explain the integrated functions of the body by the philosophically sound but scientifically mysterious humors of Greek medicine, to its incorporation into the pharmacopoeias of the eighteenth century. The concept of internal secretions germinated in the anatomical discoveries of the Renaissance, which described ductless glands, and after the discovery of the circulation, came the suggestion of "internal secretions" into blood as organ "emanations which are useful to the body." The principal events that led to the emergence of endocrinology occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century, from the experimental studies of Claude Bernard (1813-1878), the clinical observations of Thomas Addison (1793-1860), and the combined experimental and clinical studies of Brow-Sequard (1817-1894). The first decades of the twentieth century saw in sequence the isolation of crude organ extracts, their preparation as hormones in pure crystalline form, and their ultimate use in the cure of diseases that had haunted mankind thereto.