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Shen Nung Research Paper

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Shen-Nung carried a constant concerned (his priests were suffering from illness despite their magical rites) which determined him to find an alternate means of relieving the sick. Since he also was an expert farmer and had a thorough familiarity with plants, he decided to explore the curative powers of China's plant life first.

In his neverending search for compounds that could help his people, Shen-Nung was his own guinea-pig. The emperor chose the perfect subject - he was said to hold the remarkable ability of being able to see through his own abdominal wall and into his stomach! Such transparency allowed him to observe first hand the effect of any particular drug on that part of the human body.

According to told stories, Shen-Nung ingested as many as seventy different poisons in just one day, to discover the antidotes for each one of them. Once all experiments came to a finish, he wrote the Pen Ts'ao book, a kind of herbal or Materia Medica as it later became known as, which listed hundreds of vegetable, animal, or mineral source derived drugs. …show more content…
The oldest known Pen Ts'ao dates back to the first century A.D. and was compiled by an yet to be known author who claimed to have incorporated the original herbal into his own work. Regardless of whether such an earlier compendium existed or not, the important fact about this first-century herbal is that it contains a reference to ma, the Chinese word for

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