The usage of Kampo medicine has been expanding in hospitals and pharmacies, and systematic education on Kampo medicines and their ingredients, crude drugs, is urgently needed. The National Examination for Pharmacists in Japan sets questions on the pharmacology and efficacy of crude drugs. Although the efficacies of Kampo formulations are approved at the national level, those of crude drugs are not approved individually except for some cases. Consequently, the efficacy description of individual crude drug in textbooks differs much depending on the authors. To clarify this situation, we developed a database for the description of the efficacy of 129 crude drugs used in ethical Kampo formulation in major textbooks from 1887 to the present, to explore the possibility of standardizing the efficacy of crude drugs. For the national examination, for example, the efficacy can be estimated by the length and the abundance of description in the textbook. Part I describes the efficacies of 67 early crude drugs in katakana order.
