Using animals as ingredients in medicine is no monopoly of the Chinese. When mankind's ancestors first appeared on the earth they naturally looked to plants and animals for medicinal ingredients.

Yeh Feng-tzu, a professor at the China Medical College who has made a study of animal medicinal ingredients, says that folk remedies around the world are based in origin on medicines using herbal and animal ingredients. That is true not only of China but also of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, from which ancient texts recording traditional remedies still survive today.

Being easier to obtain, plants have been used in the traditional medicines of most countries more widely than have animal in gredients. But in China, where the concepts of health and diet have always gone hand in hand, the use of nutritious animal ingredients has been much more common than in other countries and in no way secondary to that of plants.

According to Chinese medicine, when a person is sick, the ailing part of the body serves merely as a red light or warning for the overall bodily system. Therefore, so long as the body as a whole is kept healthy and well nourished, the part with a problem will naturally be cured more easily.

Research has constantly been carried out, both in China and abroad, on the medicinal ingredients described in the Pen-ts'ao kang- mu, or Compendium of Materia Medica, the great pharmacological work of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), but because of the complex factors involved, their effective components have been difficult to analyze.

"Ginseng alone has been the subject of hundreds of research papers, and the components that make it effective are still in dispute," says Chang Chi Hsien, Chairman of the Committee on Chinese Medicine and Pharmacy of the ROC Department of Health. He adds that the composition of animal medicinal ingredients is even more complex than that of herbal ingredients, making research into them even more difficult.

But the fact that their effective components have so far defied analysis in no way impugns the effectiveness of Chinese medicines or implies that they cannot be further advanced.

Many Western medicines that have been effective at first in curing certain diseases have later been found to have harmful side effects, antibiotics being a prime example for many people. The wonder drug of today may be proven a lethal poison and pulled from the market tomorrow.

Although Western drugs have been in the forefront of medical science for the past three centuries, "their side effects have caused many Westerners to turn back in search of natural medicines," says Hsien-chang Chang, Chief of the Pharmacognosy Section at the Brion Research Institute of Taiwan. Even today, he adds, many natural medicines cannot be replaced by manmade drugs, and many of the basic ingredients of manmade drugs come from natural medicines.

No matter how advanced our technology may become, we remain dependent on animals for our very existence, one reason why Westerners have set up gene banks. Sharks, apparently the sole animal species immune to cancer, are the subject of constant research in the United States in the hope of finding a cure for cancer. And even if not all animals yield medicinal ingredients, their help is required in experimentation and the testing of new drugs.

Seen from this point of view, the use of rhinoceros horns in Chinese medicine should not be criticized too severely.

According to the owner of a Chinese medicine store on Tihua Street in Taipei, rhinoceros horn is a highly potent ingredient of which only a tiny amount is required each time, so that a single horn can be used in the preparation of over a thousand doses. The quantity consumed is extremely limited.

The problem lies in the fact that as restrictions on wild animal imports have become ever tougher and rhinoceroses ever scarcer, some purveyors of Chinese medicine--holding the attitude "stock up while you can" and "even if nobody buys it, you can still keep it around as a display gimmick"--have been buying up horns as quickly as they can.

Rhinoceros horns have consequently been driven sky-high in price, thereby encouraging poachers to kill the animals illegally and cut off the horns. Not to shirk the indirect moral responsibility involved, the government prohibited their importation.

In addition to criticism over rhinoceros horns, international protests have been raised over reports from the mainland that hunters in Kuangsi Province have been capturing musk deer in large quantities, removing their musk sacs, stripping off the hide, and selling the meat as a dietary supplement.

"Actually, there's no reason they go to all the trouble," Chang Chi Hsien says, explaining that before Western medicine was introduced to China, the demand for animals used in Chinese medicine was so great that many of them were raised in captivity, obviating the need to hunt them in the wild.

Even today raising scorpions is an important local industry in Honan and Shantung, as are white flower snakes in Kuangtung and toads in Liaoning; and the deer, almost no part of which is left unused, is practically a domesticated species. "They cut off the horns each year without having to kill them," Chang says.

Rhinos, though, are different. Besides facing extinction, they cannot be kept and propagated in captivity, and because they attack people who approach them, poachers often kill them just for their horns.

"Actually there are a number of drugs to relieve fever these days, and there's no reason we should import rhino horns," Chang stresses. Otherwise, by accelerating the rhino's extinction, we will only make its horn even rarer.

Did Rhinoceroses Live in China Once Too?

Experts say that rhinoceroses existed in China before the Warring States Period (403-222 B.C.), which explains why the Shan-hai ching, or Classic of the Mountains and Seas, from the later Han dynasty (206 B.C.- 219 A.D.) mentions medicine made from their horns. Why did they disappear from China? Overcatching is certainly a possibility, so that later generations have had to rely on "imports."

Oracle Bone Writing Was Discovered in a Chinese Medicine Store?

Around the turn of the century Liu E, the author of the novel Lao-ts'an yu-chi, or The Travels of Old Ts'an, and a noted expert in ancient Chinese writing, bought some "dragon bones" in a Peking medicine store to cure an illness. He was surprised to discover that the bones were carved with an unfamiliar script that proved to be the first physical evidence of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1800-1400 B.C.). His illness? Malaria.

Are People a Source of Medicinal Ingredients Too?

The description of animal-based medicines in the Pen-ts'ao kang-mu, or Compendium of Materia Medica, includes a section on "man." According to that work, our fingernails, our hair, and the urine of prepubescent boys as well as the placentas of newly born infants (called purple river chariots) can all be used as medicinal ingredients. Placenta, the medicinal use of which was introduced to China from the Ryukyu Islands during the T'ang dynasty (618-907), stimulates the production of milk and is already being used in a drug production in West Germany.

[Picture Caption]

Animal ingredients of all sorts are used in Chinese medicine.

Many rhinos have been slaughtered for the "precious jewels" on the ends of their noses. (photo by Vincent Chang)

At a time when nutritious foods are as readily available as they are today, is a scene like this one really necessary?

Natural medicines are the fruits of thousands of years of experience, and their curative powers are described in detail in ancient medical works.

Is setting out a shocking animal skull the only way of indicating a Chinese medicine store?

How many of these Chinese medicinal ingredients can you name? Pictured from left to right at bottom are musk sacs; dried cockroaches and scorpions; shed cicada casings; and "purple river chariots," or placenta.

Many rhinos have been slaughtered for the "precious jewels" on the ends of their noses. （photo by Vincent Chang）

At a time when nutritious foods are as readily available as they are today, is a scene like this one really necessary?

Is setting out a shocking animal skull the only way of indicating a Chinese medicine store?

Natural medicines are the fruits of thousands of years of experience, and their curative powers are described in detail in ancient medical works.

How many of these Chinese medicinal ingredients can you name? Pictured from left to right at bottom are musk sacs; dried cockroaches and scorpions; shed cicada casings; and "purple river chariots," or placenta.

Pictured from left to right at bottom are musk sacs.

dried cockroaches and scorpions.

shed cicada casings.

and "purple river chariots," or placenta.