 Preface of Manfred Porkert, Professor extraordinary emeritus of Sinolgy Including the Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine at Universitat Munchen, Germany. In China, rational medical theory had developed for more than twenty centuries, that is since the 2nd century B.C. until well into our 20th century, nearly unaffected by exterior influence. The result of such prolongued undisturbed maturation is a system of methodological consistency and therapeutic effectivenes unparelleled anywhere else by human endeavour. Naturally, "methodological consistency" and "therapeutic effectiveness" in order to become manifest in practice and accessible to experience, require the vehicle of consistent linguistic expression, in other words, the expression through adequate concepts and coherent presentation. This is where Giulia Boschi's La Radice e i Fiori comes in. Her book is a major effort compounded of sesitivity towords the subject, painstaking and persevering work in the elucidation of original sources and lucid presentation of her findings. It is a most timely undertaking at a historical moment when each of these requirements are made slight of, obscured, lost sight of in pratically all countries of our globe, including, to start with, in China proper.(...)
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