Revisiting traditional Chinese materia medica from European historical collections and perspective for current use

The catalogue of the Westhoff collection of Chinese materia medica (c. 1870): Evidence of interaction between a Chinese medicine practitioner and the Dutch in Indonesia

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE

The Westhoff collection of Chinese materia medica (c. 1870) at the Utrecht University Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands, contains an original, handwritten catalogue, which was putatively ascribed to a Chinese medicine practitioner. It provides a detailed record of the Chinese names, plant parts, preparations, and applications of the specimens contained in glass bottles, which probably reflects the physician's personal interpretation of Chinese medicine in Indonesia at the end of the 19th century. Such individual catalogues can reveal historical changes and regional variations in the use of traditional Chinese medicine, which can lead to a better understanding of the history and development of this field.

AIM OF THE STUDY

We addressed the following questions: 1) What are the contents of the Westhoff catalogue? 2) What medicinal preparations and applications were recorded in the catalogue, and which ones are dominant? 3) How similar is the use of Chinese materia medica in Westhoff catalogue compared to the modern Chinese Pharmacopeia? 4) What other specific information is contained in the Westhoff catalogue?

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The catalogue had been digitized previously, and all handwritten Dutch text has been transcribed and translated into English. The information for each entry was summarized and analyzed, the medicinal applications were compared to modern Chinese pharmacopeia or other monographs on Chinese materia medica.

RESULTS

The catalogue contains 436 entries, for which 395 corresponding specimens still exist in the Westhoff collection of Chinese materia medica. Each entry contains a serial number, a Chinese name, a phonetic Dutch transcription of the Chinese name, a description of the plant, animal, or mineral origin of the medicinal product, the preparation method, and the medical indication for which it should be used. The dominant preparation method is decoction (79% of the entries). The most frequently mentioned applications are fever, skin diseases, strengthening and wounds. Around 80% of the medicinal applications in the catalogue were also listed for the same CMM in modern monographs. The catalogue also sheds light on typical characteristics of popular medicine, their geographic origin, and social aspects of traditional Chinese medicine in Indonesia around 1870.

CONCLUSIONS

The Westhoff catalogue is a valuable record of Chinese materia medica and its practice in a specific time and space. It reflects an individual physician's interpretation of Chinese medicine, shows the difficulties in the interpretation of cultural-bound health issues between the Dutch and the Chinese, and provides evidence that traditional Chinese medicine spread not only in East Asia but also to the distant Western world.

Meeting the Challenge 2: Identification of Potential Chemical Probes for Parkinson's Disease from Ligusticum chuanxiong Hort Using Cytological Profiling

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been around for thousands of years and is increasingly gaining popularity in the Western world to treat various complex disorders including the incurable neurodegenerative condition, Parkinson's Disease (PD). One of the many directions in recent studies of PD is utilizing the phenotypic assay, or cytological profiling, to evaluate the phenotypic changes of PD-implicated cellular components in patient-derived olfactory neuroepithelial (hONS) cells, upon treating the cells with extracts or pure compounds. To obtain small molecules for studies utilizing PD phenotyping assays, Ligusticum chuanxiong Hort was selected for analysis as it is a popular Chinese herbal medicine used for treating PD-like symptoms. Fifty-three secondary metabolites, including six new compounds, were isolated from the ethanolic extract of L. chuanxiong; their structures were elucidated based on several spectroscopic techniques such as NMR, MS, Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), UV, and theoretical density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Cytological profiling of the afforded natural products against PD hONS cells revealed 34 compounds strongly perturbated the staining of several cellular organelles. In fact, greaterthan 1.5-fold change was observed compared to the control (dimethyl sulfoxide; DMSO), with early endosome, lysosome, and autophagosome (LC3b) being particularly affected. Given these biological compartments are closely related to PD pathogenesis, the results helped rationalize the traditional medicinal use of L. chuanxiong in PD treatment. Further, the hit compounds can serve as chemical probes to map the molecular pathways underlying PD, potentially leading to new therapeutic targets for PD.