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BOOK REVIEWS
This handbook has been produced by the Guangzhou Institute of Chinese Medicine to meet the need for an authoritative Chinese-English dictionary of Chinese medical terms, primarily to serve those Western scholars interested in traditional Chinese medicine. The board of compilers set up by the Institute consisted of "experts in Chinese and Western medicine as well as translators". The glossary consists of a 253-page Chinese-English dictionary of Chinese medical terms, arranged in order of the number of strokes of the first character of the term, followed by Appendices, of which the most important are Appendix I (Nomenclature of Common Chinese Materia Medica), which lists the 870 most frequently met with Chinese medicinal drugs, with translations into both English and Latin, and Appendix II (Nomenclature of Acupuncture and Moxibustion Points), which lists and translates 407 Acupuncture and Moxibustion Points, arranged in 14 "Channels" and one group of "Extraordinary Points."
This glossary is well put together, and the English used is, in most cases, accurate. It will certainly meet most of the needs of the scholars to whom it is addressed, and will fill a very real gap in the material available to students of Chinese traditional medicine.
J
Despite its value, however, there are some features of the book which are less than completely ideal. The lack of an English-Chinese index will severely limit the uses to which the Glossary can be put. The lack of a detailed acupuncture and moxibustion chart to go with Appendix II will necessitate users cross-referencing to a second volume: surely an unnecessary nuisance. The English is often either emphatically medical ("osteomalacia" and "hemoptysis", for instance, are the sole translations given for 骨軟化 and 咯血; clearly, for anyone other than a fully qualified Western doctor, the translation is as obscure as the original, although many scholars other than fully qualified doctors will wish to use this glossary), or else so literal a translation of the Chinese ("single-yang" for...) as to be of little value to anyone. A few more explanatory notes as clarifications of the translations would have been of great value. Finally, the use of simplified characters throughout seriously devalues the book for the very large number of scholars who would wish to use it as a guide to classical medical texts written in non-simplified characters,