515 cards, printable, free to use
Download the deck (PDF, 460 KB)
515 cards across 129 sheets of A4. The front of each card carries the pinyin name. The back carries the pharmaceutical Latin, the English name, the channels entered, and every action recorded for that herb with its indications underneath.
Print double-sided, flipped on the long edge, at 100% scale. Not “fit to page”: scaling shifts the two sides out of line with each other and the backs stop matching their fronts. Four cards to a sheet, cut along the dashed lines.
Printed single-sided it still works — the fronts and backs come out as alternating sheets in the same order.
A herb gets a card when the catalogue has at least one clinical action recorded for it. That is 515 of the 953 herbs with a page here; the other 438 hold a name, a Latin binomial and little else, and a card for those would test nothing.
Processed forms — Zhi Gan Cao, Jiang Ban Xia — have no card of their own. They are sections of the herb they are prepared from rather than separate records, and most carry no clinical text apart from their parent's.
Tone marks are dropped. The deck is set in the PDF standard fonts, which have no toned vowels, and the catalogue writes pinyin without them nearly everywhere in any case.
The deck is rebuilt from the catalogue, so a herb that gains its actions later gains a card the next time it is built. The file is dated on its first page.
Use them, print them, hand them out. They are drawn from a reference work that is knowingly incomplete: they are a revision aid, not a materia medica, and nothing in them is medical advice or a substitute for training.
If the deck is useful, a donation helps cover the hosting and the time. The deck's first page carries a code for the same link.