It is undoubtedly important that herb can cure certain sickness. However, its activity to certain symptom varies between each plant species, growing place, harvesting time, and so on, because herb is the natural product. Here arises a key word-selection-, professional viewpoint of herb. Consulting with the old books about herb written by professionals at that time, we can imagine how much difficulty did they have and how did they make efforts on selection in order to use the herb with good quality.
At the beginning of Kampo Medicine in Japan, it was totally an imported medicine so that its original herb stuffs had to be brought from abroad. But gradually Kampo Medicine has been changed into Japanese style; lots of Japanese substitutes were developed for Chinese herb species, and also, cultivation or evaluation of those substitutes was studied. Such kind of study advanced much in Edo-era.
In the lecture, two popular herbs, licorice and cinnamon, were chosen to be discussed for examples of the above mentioned, and the author's special experiences were also mentioned.

Purpose: With the aim of improving the efficiency of smoking cessation treatment, we analyzed and classified various factors to identify the relationships between the background of patients and effects of treatment, and examine their characteristics.
Methods: We conducted a questionnaire survey to collect information on the situation of patients, and obtained their treatment data from medical records.  Decision tree analysis, a data mining method, was employed to examine these data.
Results: According to the results of the survey, the smoking cessation rate was 80.4%.  The rate was associated with CO concentrations in the breath at the initial examination, nicotine content in cigarettes smoked by patients, and the daily and total number of cigarettes smoked.  The smoking cessation rate among patients under emotional stress was 76.2%; the rate was higher when patients were able to reduce their mental stress levels.
Conclusion: We identified characteristic relationships between the background of patients and the effects of treatment, and they proved to be useful for the improvement of the smoking cessation rate.