[Geographical views in traditional Chinese medicine]

Interdisciplinary integration is a major feature of current scientific and technological development and also an inherent demand of economic and social development. The classic works in traditional Chinese medicine(TCM), such as Huangdi's Internal Classic(Huang Di Nei Jing) and Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica(Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing), contain rich and distinctive geographic ideas about the origin of Chinese medicine and prescriptions. There are many TCM schools and the distribution of each school has obvious geographical characteristics. The difference in geographical space is a major factor causing the difference in schools. There have been records of drugs and places of origin in previous documents of the Han Dynasty. Many drug names in Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica begin with ancient country names or ancient place names, indicating that the compilers attached great importance to the relationship between drugs and places of origin. Doctors in the Tang Dynasty have realized that the quality of medicinal materials was closely related to the place of origin, and each place of origin had herbalists to support the harvesting. The national yearly harvested drugs were all distributed with the places of origin. In the Song Dynasty, there were more records about the origin of drugs than in the Tang Dynasty, and the drawings attached to the Materia Medica Arranged According to Pattern(Zheng Lei Ben Cao) were titled with the names of the origins. In the Jin and Yuan dynasties, the literature on Chinese materia medica inherited the relationship between the origin and quality of drugs and contained rich geographical views in the "medication method". In the Ming Dynasty, the literature on Chinese materia medica was the first to clearly label the Daodi origin, and recognized the differences in quality and application of drugs between different origins. In the Qing Dynasty, doctors realized that there were variations and differences in the origins of drugs used by doctors in different periods, and the problem of origin was one of the reasons for the ineffectiveness of drugs. During the period of the Republic of China, doctors also paid great attention to the relationship between the origin of drugs and the quality of drugs, and the changes in the origin of drugs. TCM and geography share a common philosophical foundation. To inherit and develop the experience of doctors in the past dynasties on the relationship between drugs and origins, it is necessary to combine "Chinese materia medica" with "geography" to carry out the research on the geography of Chinese medicine, conduct multidisciplinary integration, build a new way to inherit and innovate the essence of TCM, promote the connection between philosophy of Yi, medical science, pharmacology, and geography, better serve the production practice of TCM, and promote the solution of problems related to the development of the Chinese medicine industry.