Three Medical Traditions That Never Stopped Being Practiced

Traditional Chinese Medicine has been practiced continuously in China for more than two thousand years, built around qi, yin-yang balance and the five phases, using herbal formulas, acupuncture and other techniques. Its foundational text, the Huangdi Neijing, was compiled by many unknown authors over centuries rather than written by the legendary Yellow Emperor it is traditionally credited to.

Tu Youyou was a pharmaceutical chemist recruited into a secret Chinese military program searching classical medical texts for a working antimalarial. A fourth-century recipe by Ge Hong, describing a cold-water soak rather than the usual heated extraction, led her to isolate artemisinin in 1971 and 1972, work that won her the 2015 Nobel Prize.

This treatment's history runs from quinine, used by Jesuit missionaries in Peru from the 1630s and purified in 1820, through synthetic drugs like chloroquine, to artemisinin, which Tu Youyou isolated from sweet wormwood in 1972. Combined with a partner drug, artemisinin is now the World Health Organization's recommended first-line option worldwide.

Malaria takes its name from the Italian for bad air, the explanation ancient physicians gave before its mosquito-borne parasite was identified in the late nineteenth century. Fevers matching the disease appear in Chinese medical texts from around 2700 BCE and in the writings of Hippocrates, two traditions describing the same illness centuries apart.

Ayurveda is one of the world's oldest continuously practiced medical systems, organized around the concept of doshas and still a formal part of India's healthcare system today. Its two central texts, the Charaka Samhita on internal medicine and the Sushruta Samhita on surgery, were compiled and revised by multiple authors over centuries rather than at a single date.

Unani medicine grew out of the same Hippocratic and Galenic humoral theory as much of Western medical history, then was systematized and expanded during the Islamic Golden Age. It remains formally practiced and regulated today in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine, completed in 1025, became Unani medicine's most authoritative codification and, translated into Latin, remained a standard textbook in European universities into the seventeenth century. This entry holds his medical work specifically; his philosophical work is recorded as a separate facet of the same figure in the Divinity and Science atlases.