建立「疫疾」中醫藥典籍文獻擷取索引典

BUILDING AN EPIDEMIC DISEASE THESAURUS RETRIEVAL FROM TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINAL LITERATURE

今年（2003 ），在亞洲及加拿大所爆發之流行病──嚴重急性呼吸道症候群（SARS ），醫療、衛生及生物科技界精英皆投入抗SARS 最前線，人人談SARS 色變。中國古代當大疫流行，統治者承受相當大的壓力，所以史籍上很少詳細記錄嚴重大規模的疫情，經常以寥寥數語便略過，因為封建社會認為“疫”是天災不詳之兆。中國歷代醫家，對抗疫的貢獻相當大，如東漢末年張仲景之所以著《傷寒論》就是因為大疫流行之故。倉促中及電子典籍來源所限，本研究在短短三個月內整理出22 本電子中醫藥典籍，約一千萬字文獻資料，並建立「疫」索引典內含37 個關鍵詞，共篩選出二萬一千餘個與索引典相關之條文，並且以動態資料庫形式，放置在TCMET 網際網路上供學者專家們參考、下載及研究。Early 2003, an incidence of epidemic disease----SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was occurred mainly in Asia district and Toronto, Canada. Health professional and biomedical specialist were dedicated themselves to the frontier of anti-SARS, and people endangered stressfully. Lethal epidemic contagious diseases occurred in ancient China, which used to be considered as a disaster from the heaven and considered as a sign of bad fortune, gave ancient emperor in China a lot of trouble in governing their country. In fact, most of the ancient official historical documentation of the severe epidemic regime was over-simplified or skipped and very few occurrences were recorded precisely. Historically, there were many ancient Chinese medical physicians dedicated themselves in treating for epidemic diseases and some scholars put their effort on collecting effective medical formula from their ancestor. Each modern traditional Chinese doctor knows that a famous medical doctor, Juei-Tain Cheng, in the Hang Dynasty (200 AD) wrote a medical book “Shang Han Lun” because of a lethal outbreak of an epidemic disease----Shang Han which causing death to a lot of his relatives. In this study, a set of 22 volumes of electronic medical literatures from the ancient China was collected and stored into the database. Additionally, a thesaurus was defined with 37 keywords relating to “Epidemic Disease”. Around twenty-one-hundred-thousand of sentences relating to the Epidemic thesaurus were retrieved from the medical literature database. All the extracted information was stored in the data repository and showed on the TCMET (Traditional Chinese Medicinal Electronic Text) internet dynamically.