Textual research on species of traditional Chinese marine medicine in Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica / 中草药

ABSTRACT

Shengnong's Classic of Materia Medica is the antecessor of existing monographs on Chinese materia medica (CMM) in China. Modern scholars have made a lot of achievements in the researching of the academic thinking of Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica. In the aspect of pharmaceutical research, most of them have the tendency of studying terrestrial and fresh-water aquatic CMM, while the research of traditional marine Chinese medicine is relatively less. At the same time, there is still controversy in the literature on the number of traditional marine Chinese medicines in Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica. By consulting ancient herbal literatures, and combining modern results of marine medicine research in different disciplines including biology, mineralogy, history, geography, and so on, this paper analyzed and compared the cultivar classification, habitats distribution, and the differences of species and number of marine medicine in different literatures, thoroughly and deeply researched the 11 species which are always arguable, put forward that a total of 12 marine Chinese herbs such as seaweed, oyster shell, crude salt were recorded in Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica. The research results of this article provided a useful reference for the academic research of marine medicine of Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica.