News

The nine-volume Chinese medicine book series compiled by Professor Zhao Zhongzhen, Chair Professor of SCM, was launched in Beijing on 7 June at a ceremony organised by China Press of Traditional Chinese Medicine and attended by more than a hundred guests, including Professor Zhao’s readers, friends and supporters from the academia and the profession from across the country.

A world-leading authority on pharmacognosy, Professor Zhao shares his wealth of knowledge from over three decades of bencao studies in the publication, covering, among others, Chinese medicine food therapy; identification methods, clinical applications, compatibility rules and principles, potential toxicity and cultivation of medicinal plants; as well as the proper use of proprietary Chinese medicines, folk medicines and exotic herbal medicines.  Launched to great acclaim in earlier years, individual books in the collection have been translated into languages such as English and German and distributed in various countries around the world.

Speaking at the event, Professor Zhao said it was his intention to channel his research expertise and experiences and those of his fellow writers into creating an encyclopedia of bencao knowledge for general people when he put together this book series.  He hoped that the books, well-illustrated and simply worded, could allow more people to grasp the fundamentals of Chinese medicine and arouse the interest of readers in further study of bencao.

The book launch also featured an open dialogue between Professor Zhao and Mr. Xu Wenbing, renowned Chinese medicine physician and Head of Beijing Houpu Chinese Medicine Academy, in which they dived into topics ranging from the history of traditional Chinese medicine, the thought process behind diagnosis and treatment in Chinese medicine to the safety of Chinese proprietary and herbal medicines.