Breath of Life

Treating asthma with ephedrine, a drug derived from the horsetail plant, has been known in the west since the 1920s. But Chinese doctors were using the drug nearly 1700 years earlier. Its use was being advocated by a doctor called Zhang Zhongjiang as early as the 2nd century AD. Zhang, who lived from about AD 152 to 219, wrote a massive compendium of all the medical knowledge then available in China. In addition, he complied a detailed list of techniques that doctors could use to diagnose a patient’s illness.