• Journal of the Korean Institute of Oriental Medical Informatics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.64-77
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• 2012

Donguibogam, Korea's cultural heritage and traditional Oriental medicine book listed in the World Heritage three years ago, is indeed great in its importance and value. Korea's posterity has sought treatment methods through the medical book and their researches on that book have continued. However, it is rare to make the concrete analysis on the medicines for prescriptions recorded in the book. In this study, we reviewed "Ears" in the Section "Bodily Appearance" among the five chapters of Donguibogam, and analyzed the 55 types of prescriptions for ear diseases, the medical characteristics, tastes, prime classification of medical herbs, and acupunctural effects, and the dosage forms depending on prescriptions. For insect-entering ear diseases and 20 kinds of a single-medicine prescription also, the treatments are presented in the book, but we presented the texts only and excluded them in the analysis. We also excluded overlapping prescriptions and adding and reducing prescriptions of the 55 prescriptions, and thus classified the left 42 proscriptions by dosage form. As a result: 1. With respect to medical characteristics, the medicine with warm characteristics reached 9 types(40.9%), the highest rate, followed by the medicine with cold characteristics 8 types (36.4%). 2. Concerning medical tastes, the medicine with bitter taste included 12 types (54.5%), the medicine with sour taste 10 types (45.5%), and the medicine with sweet taste 7 types (31.8%). It was unusual that of the 22 medicines used for multipurpose, no medicine with the taste was found. 3. For the acupunctural effects, the medicine with acupuncture effects for spleen medirian reached 12 types in total (54.5%). On the contrary, the medicine with the effects for pericardium meridian reached only one (4.5%) among the total of 22 medicines. 4. In the dosage form of 42 prescriptions, powder medicine was 15 types (35.7%), and decoction medicine was 14 (33.3%). Powder, dedoction, and pill medicines accounted for 90.4% of the total medicine type. It was found that in particular, for ear diseases powder medicine was used more frequently than decoction medicine.