Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body "Three Corpses; demonic spirits believed to live in the human body and hasten death" and "gǔdú" 蠱毒 "gu poisoning"; a poison produced by venomous insects; cast a black magic spirit possession over someone". The first "Bencao gangmu" prescription for human nails is not from Chinese medical texts but from Daoist rituals for expelling what (Cooper & Sivin (1973: 220) describe as the "Three Corpse-Worms 三尸, the chief of the "inner gods" who are to the individual microcosm what the celestial bureaucracy is to the cosmos." Prescription 52.6.1, the 斬三尸法 "Method of Beheading the Three Corpses", involves supernaturally cutting the nails
Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body were successfully making quasi-empirical preparations of active substances with androgens and estrogens, a technique that modern biochemists did not develop until the early 20th century. The physician William C. Cooper and the sinologist Nathan Sivin (1973) chose what the Chinese call "rényào" 人藥 "human drugs" as a pilot experiment sample for pharmacologically analyzing the efficacy of drugs used in TCM. In contrast to many traditional Chinese plant, animal, and mineral pharmaceuticals with uncertain active constituents, the chemical composition of the human body and parts is well known, and "their therapeutic effectiveness, or lack of it, can be objectively, if approximately,