Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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This article demonstrates the medicinal usage of ginseng in the West from 1660 to 1914. Asian[Korea] ginseng was first introduced into England in the early 17th century, and North American ginseng was found in the early 18th century. Starting from the late 17th century doctors prescribed ginseng to cure many different kinds of ailments and disease such as: fatigue general lethargy, fever, torpidity, trembling in the joints, nervous disorder, laughing and crying hysteria, scurvy, spermatic vessel infection, jaundice, leprosy, dry gripes and constipation, strangury, yellow fever, dysentery, infertility and addictions of alcohol, opium and tobacco, etc. In the mid-18th century Materia Medica began to specify medicinal properties of ginseng and the patent medicines containing ginseng were widely circulated. However, starting in the late 18th century the medicinal properties of ginseng began to be disparaged and major pharmacopoeias removed ginseng from their contents. The reform of the pharmacopoeia, influenced by Linnaeus in botany and Lavoisier in chemistry, introduced nomenclature that emphasized identifying ingredients and active constituents. Western medicine at this period, however, failed to identify and to extract the active constituents of ginseng. Apart from the technical underdevelopment of the period, the medical discourses reveal that the so-called chemical experiment of ginseng were conducted with unqualified materials and without proper differentiation of various species of ginseng.
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PMID:The Medicinal Usage and Restriction of Ginseng in Britain and America, 1660-1900. 2931 35

The concept of psychosomatic disorders, as defined by modern medicine, was difficult to be perceived by the ancient Greek physicians. Two main reasons contributed to this. One was that physicians in Greek antiquity had formed the idea that the mental illnesses that were recognized at that time, namely mania, melancholy, frenzy, caros, lethargy, apoplexy, but even epilepsy, was the result of a disturbance of the essential elements of the body, the balance of them contributed to the preservation of health. Thus, depending on the school of medical thought of each physician in antiquity, mental and corporal illnesses were the result of various disorders such as the dyscrasia of humors for the physicians of the Dogmatic school that followed the Hippocratic principles or the disorder of the qualitative characteristics of the humor and the pneuma (air), as the physicians of the Pneumatic School considered, but also of the stenosis or the expansion of the pores as the physicians of the Methodic school thought. Although there was the perception that the diseases were the result of various combinations of the previous theories, as concluded by the physicians who constituted the Eclectic school. The second reason was that ancient physicians could not perceive the autonomy of man's psychic world as an element of human nature in which emotional distress and irrational mental processing of stimuli from the social, cultural and natural environment of the individual would be aggravating to the challenge of mental imbalance. Nevertheless, many physicians such as physicians who wrote various work of Corpus Hippocraticum, Soranus of Ephesus (1st - 2nd c. AD) Galen (1st - 2nd c. AD), Aretaeus of Cappadocia (1st - 2nd or 4th c. AD) and Caelius Aurelianus (5th c. AD) did not forget to describe in their works psychosomatic disorders as they are defined by modern medicine. In their works there are the observations about intense sweating, tremor, eating disorders, hysteria and even death as a result of an intense and long psychological unrest. These corporal symptoms, although were onset due to a psychological unequilibrium they could not been listed by the ancient Greek physicians in any of the mental diseases as they were defined in antiquity. The psychological disturbance which could provoke the above corporal disorders arose by various phobias, shame, sorrow, anger, envy, excessive drinks and food, excessive sexual desire, passion for gambling and anxiety of everyday life.
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PMID:[Psychosomatic disorders in ancient Greek medicine]. 3010 53