ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Herbal Remedy to Pill and back again: The Tale of the Traditional Chinese medicine Mahuang in the United States 1920 - 2000s

• In Event: Roots and Remedies: Global Histories of the Pharmaceuticalization of Herbal Knowledge III

English Abstract

In 1920, Ko Kuei Chen 陳克恢 (K.K. Chen) joined the University of Wisconsin’s School of Pharmacy, spent three years studying numerous herbs associated with Chinese traditional pharmacopeias alongside other Chinese pharmacy students whose projects focused on Chinese medicinal plants. Chen’s crafting of his research presentation, emphasizing mahuang and ephedrine, being of Chinese origin, successfully fulfilled the goal of reshaping traditional Chinese medicine with chemistry for a molecular-thinking world. Once relegated to American Chinatown pharmacies, mahuang became a medicinal import, arriving from the tons to pharmaceutical processing factories across the USA. This paper examines the changing meaning of botanical pharmacy and how the utilization of chemical language fundamentally transformed mahuang into ephedrine. The biochemical drug, over time, began to be separated from its botanical origins until the early 2000s, when numerous deaths were linked to the overconsumption of caffeine and ephedra. I argue that the ephedrine kept its botanical identity well into the 1950s, avoiding much of the regulation of similar amphetamine drugs. However, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it lost the connection between plant and drug, reflecting the public's loss of memory of the origins of pharmacy. Botanical medicine continues to produce powerful medications, but the connection between plants and drugs is no longer lucrative; thus, references to flora are all but omitted from public knowledge of legal drugs, creating the myth that plant-originating medicines are less potent than their chemical counterparts.

Author

• JJ Strange, University of Wisconsin–Madison