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Recalling days of TCM delivery
BEFORE the days of manufactured pills and capsules, preparing traditional Chinese medicines for consumption was often a complicated and time-consuming process. For this reason, many TCM pharmacies offered special decoctions and delivery services.
Patients would bring a TCM doctor’s prescription for herbs and other medicinal ingredients to a pharmacy, which would then grind, cook or boil these ingredients into the desired form. In the early 20th century, many pharmacies dolled out doses for each day due to the poor preservation technology of the time.
After preparation, the medicines were put into bottles or other containers, each bearing the name and address of its intended recipient. In many cases, a delivery man would leave these medicines in a patient’s home milk box, while also collecting empty bottles from previous doses.
Xu Chongdao Pharmacy on the Huaihai Road was the first pharmacy to initiate such services. Other big pharmacies, like Tong Hanchun, eventually followed suit.
Although this practice has largely been abandoned today, some older Shanghainese residents still insist on having their medicines prepared the traditional way at local pharmacies. In the opinions of these stalwarts, good medicines must be prepared slowly in earthen pots, rather than prepared and packaged for mass-consumption.
Soaking, cooking, filtering and second cooking are all essential steps in the TCM-making process, with a single dose often taking up to one hour to prepare. Some rich families had a maid to handle this process. In common families, the wife might handle medicine prep.
After consumption, some local families would toss the decoction dregs on busy streets, in hopes that the illness would be trampled by passing pedestrians, and unable to make trouble again.
As for the requirements of more complicated preparations, such as making gaofang (oral herbal paste) reinforcements in winter, specialized door-to-door preparation services appeared in the 1980s.
Pharmacists were invited to a family’s home with their tools and herbs, and often lived there until the paste was completed.
“It took at least three whole days to complete a gaofang product for a month-long dose; and families preferred the pastes produced in their own homes. They wanted to make sure that they got all the expensive ingredients they were promised,” says Chen Weiming, a pharmacist who’s worked at Yueyang TCM Hospital since the 1980s.
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