Shen-Nung

The most ancient uses of spices appear to be therapeutic in nature. The use of spices was common in China but tittle, if any, authentic Chinese records exist to confirm this. According to Chinese myths and legends, Shen Nung, the Divine Cultivator, founded Chinese medicine and discovered the curative powers of many herbs. He is said to have described more than 100 plants in a treatise reportedly written in 2700 BC. It has been shown, however, that no written language was available in China at that time. Although some of the herbal uses in the treatise go back several centuries BC, the work seems to have been produced by unknown authors in the first century AD. Other records on the use of cassia and ginger are known to have been written in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, in the latter case by Confucius. 

The Chinese are considered as leaders in using natural products for healing. The oldest compilation of Chinese herbs is Shen Nung Pen Ts ao, which lists 385 materials. Pen Ts ao Ma catalogue, written by Li-Chen during the Ming Dynasty, (1573—1620) mentions 1898 herbal drugs and 8160 prescriptions. 

Probably the oldest reference to the cannabis plant, in a pharmacy book from 2737 BCE, is related to its use as a medicine. The Chinese emperor Shen Nung (the Divine Farmer) referred to it as the liberator of sin and recommended it for the treatment of female weakness, gout, rheumatism, malaria, constipation, and absent mindedness. By 1000 BCE, its medicinal use, as indicated by available writings, had spread to India by 500 BCE, it was familiar to the ancient Greeks. 

The tea plant (camellia sinensis) has existed in nature for 60-70 million years. The earliest Chinese literature indicates that the Chinese cultivated tea plants thousands of years ago. In the Chinese legend, the Emperor Shen-Nung (2737-2697 B.C.) placed camellia blossom tips into a cup of boiled water and pronounced the beverage healing and refreshing. The first documented medicinal use of tea stated in Shen-Nung s Book... 

The Chinese emperor Shen Nung is believed to have produced the first written account of the medicinal properties of cannabis over 2000 years ago and various formulations of herbal cannabis have been used over the centuries to treat seizures, neuralgia, dysmenorrhoea, insomnia and even gonorrhoea. The hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, from which cannabis and... 

The medical use of marijuana is not new. Five thousand years ago, the legendary Chinese Emperor Shen Nung was said to have prescribed marijuana for ailments such as gout, malaria, rheumatism, and even gas pains. — Until 1937, Americans considered marijuana a recognized medicine in good standing, distributed by leading pharmaceutical firms, and on sale at many pharmacies..—... 

Shen Nung, 2696 bc the father of Chinese medicine, noted for tasting 365 herbs. He wrote the treatise On Herbal Medical Experiment Poisons and died of a toxic dose. 

F The use of Cannabis sativa dates back to around 2700 B.C. in China, where it was recommended by Emperor Shen Nung for the treatment of various ailments. 

According to the stories told about him, Shen-Nung ingested as many as seventy different poisons in a single day and discovered the antidotes for each of them. After he finished these experiments, he wrote the Pen Ts ao, a kind of herbal ox Materia Medica as it later became known, which listed hundreds of drags derived from vegetable, animal, and mineral sources. 

Shen-Nung s solution to the problem was to advise that yin, the female plant, be the only sex cultivated in China since it produced much more of the medicinal principle than yang, the male plant. Marijuana containing yin was then to be given in cases involving a loss of yin from the body such as occurred in female weakness (menstrual fatigue), gout, rheumatism, malaria, beri-beri, constipation, and absentmindedness. 

In a book attributed to Shen-Nung s successor, the "yellow emperor", for example, the author felt that alcoholism had tmly gotten out of hand ... 

In a book about herbs, the Chinese scholar-emperor Shen Nung described in 2735 BC the beneficial effects of Ch ang Shan in the treatment of fevers [8]. This preparation is the powdered root of a plant, Dichroafehrifitga Lour. Modern medicinal chemistry has identified several alkaloids with antimalarial properties in the plant, and it is therefore clear that the ancient use of Ch ang Shan in fevers was not entirely without basis. One of the antimalarial compounds from Ch ang Shan is fihrugine (/J-dichroine), a relatively simple unichiral compound 1. Modem attempts to develop these agents as antimalarial drugs failed, due to significant toxicity [8]. 

Shen Nung also observed the stimulant properties of another Chinese plant. Ma Huang, now known as Ephedra sinica [9]. The chief active ingredient, ephedrine, is a sympathomimetic amine, and therefore it is clear in this case also that the use of Ma Huang as a stimulant had a rational basis. The ephedrine molecule is simple and contains two chiral centers the compound from ephedra is unichiral and has the 1R,2S configuration 2. Ephedrine was first isolated from Ma Huang in 1887... 

According to Chinese legend, Shen Nung, the Chinese father of agriculture and leader of an ancient clan, took it upon himself to test, one by one, hundreds of different plants to discover their nutritional and medicinal properties. Many plants turned out to be poisonous to humans. Over the millennia the Chinese used themselves this way to continue testing plants for their properties. 

Chinese Emperor Shen-Nung prescribes cannabis for senility Snmerlan/Akkadlan, cannabis use fornissati/grlef Atharva Veda,bhang for grief... 

Perhaps older yet is the Pen Tsao Ching, written in the first or second century but attributed to Eimperor Shen Nung in the third millennium B.C.E., which noted that excessive ingestion of cannabis flowers produced hallucinations (literally, seeing devils ) (Li, 1974, p. 446). 

Heterocycles have been used medicinally since the beginning of written records. Shen Nung, a Chinese scholar-emperor who lived in 2735 B.C., wrote of the herb Ch ang Shan, as being helpful in treating fevers. Ch ang Shan was later found to contain dichroins," ... 

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