What did Li Shizhen do to revise the Compendium of Materia Medica

Written by Li ShizhenCompendium of Materia MedicaThe arduous journey

Since the forty-fourth year of Jiajing (1565), Li Shizhen has been practicing medicine and writing books at the same time. Li Shizhen knew that angelica had the effect of stopping bleeding, but the angelica he saw was all sun-dried and didn't know what it looked like. Li Shizhen felt that his knowledge was too shallow, so he traveled all over the land of China.

went out and traveled all over the country, Li Shizhen was 47 years old at this time, and he had traveled almost half of China. Pangolin.

It has the effect of medicine, but how do pangolins eat ants, he only saw it in books, so he went to observe it himself. Therefore, in the "Compendium of Materia Medica", there are zoology, botany, mineralogy, etc., which is not only a medical book, but an encyclopedia.

At the age of 65, the "Compendium of Materia Medica" was written, but it could not be published. First, to Wanli.

During this year, the Wanli Emperor killed many Confucian students and did not allow Confucian scholars to publish books. Second, peasant uprisings broke out in various places later, and the publication of the book was put on hold.

Li Shizhen died at the age of 76, and it was not until three years after his death that his family printed and published the "Compendium of Materia Medica". The "Compendium of Materia Medica" was circulated among the people, and Li Shizhen was immortalized and made great contributions to medicine, zoology, botany, and mineralogy.

Li Shizhen's main achievements

Li Shizhen broke the self-study "Shennong's Materia Medica".

Since then, it has followed the classification method of upper, middle and lower grades for more than 1,000 years, and divided the medicine into 16 parts, including 60 categories, including water, fire, earth, gold and stone, grass, grain, lai, fruit, wood, utensils, insects, scales, media, birds, beasts and humans. The name of each drug label is the outline, and the following items of the outline are clear.

The book also systematically describes the knowledge of various medicines. Including correction, interpretation, interpretation, correctness and error, treatment, smell, indications, inventions, appendices, prescriptions, etc., from the history, morphology to function, prescription, etc., the description is very detailed, enriching the knowledge of materia medica.

Li Shizhen's arduous process of writing the "Compendium of Materia Medica" includes:

He repeatedly proposed to the Tai Hospital to compile the construction of materia medica.

Discuss. However, not only was his suggestion not adopted, but it was ridiculed and slandered for no reason.

Go out of the house, go deep into the mountains and fields, compare on the spot, and identify the drugs. He sometimes did not go down for several days, ate dry food when he was hungry, and spent the night in the mountains when it was dark. He tasted many medicinal herbs with his own mouth and judged the medicinal properties and efficacy.

In this way, he went through a lot of hardships and accumulated a large amount of medical information.

Compendium of Materia Medica (1578 AD) Ming. Written by Li Shizhen.

Fifty-two volumes. The author spent nearly 30 years compiling 1,892 kinds of drugs, with more than 1,000 drug maps, explaining the sexual taste, indications, medication rules, origin, form, collection, processing, and prescription compatibility of drugs, and containing more than 10,000 prescriptions. The book is available in full or abridged translations in Korean, Japanese, English, French, German, and other languages.

It is the culmination of China's pharmaceutical achievements before the 16th century.

The book not only corrects some errors in materia medica in the past, but also synthesizes a large number of scientific data, proposes a more scientific method of drug classification, integrates advanced biological evolutionary ideas, and reflects rich clinical practice. This book is also a naturalist work with worldwide influence. It is praised as an encyclopedia of China by foreign scholars.

Li Shizhen, whose name is Dongbi and whose name is near the lake, was born in 1518 in Wattita, outside the east gate of Qizhou, Hubei Province (now Qizhou Town, Qichun County, Hubei Province). Before the Ming Dynasty, this place was the junction of Yuhu Lake and Lianshi Lake, and the people along the lake often suffered from the disasters of the lake. Since the Ming Dynasty, in order to block the water of the lake, a dam was built here, and later it was called the Watt Dam.

There is a perimeter near the Wattrate Dam.

Twenty or thirty miles of rain lake is one of the scenic spots in Qizhou. In the east, there are Daquan Mountain, Longpan Mountain, Pingding Mountain, in addition to flowers, trees, bamboo forests, there are also all kinds of wild medicinal materials growing in the mountains, it is a good place with abundant products.

The Compendium of Materia Medica has not only made significant contributions to the development of pharmacology in China, but also had a profound impact on the development of medicine, botany, zoology, mineralogy and chemistry in the world.

After the book was published, it soon spread to Japan, and later to Europe and the United States, and was successively translated into more than ten languages such as Japanese, French, German, English, Latin, Russian, and Korean, and published abroad, and spread to five continents. As early as 1951, at the World Peace Council held in Vienna, Li Shizhen was listed as a celebrity in the ancient world.

His marble statue stands in the gallery of Moscow University. It not only has a great contribution to traditional Chinese medicine, but also plays a huge role in promoting the development of natural science in the world, and is known as the "Great Book of Oriental Medicine", and the famous British biologist Charles Darwin has also benefited from the "Compendium of Materia Medica" and called it "the ancient Chinese encyclopedia".

Joseph Needham, a well-known British expert on the history of Chinese science and technology, wrote in The History of Science and Technology in China: "In the 16th century, there were two great works on natural medicine in China, one was the Essence of Materia Medica at the beginning of the century (1505), and the other was the Compendium of Materia Medica, which was published at the end of the century (1595), both of which were very great. ”

The manuscript of the Compendium of Materia Medica has not been handed down, and the earliest one that can be seen is only the first engraved version printed by Hu Chenglong, a bookseller in Jinling, in the 24th year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty (1596 AD). There are 7 extant editions, of which 5 are collected abroad and only 2 are in China, which are in the library of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing and the Shanghai Science and Technology Publishing House.

Li Shizhen spent at least 27 years compiling the Compendium of Materia Medica, referring to more than 800 works related to Materia Medica, inheriting the tradition of Materia Medica for more than 1,000 years. In order to verify the collected information, Li Shizhen spent more than 4 years, with his apprentices and sons, trekking through mountains and rivers, sleeping in the open air, going to Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and other places, and climbing famous mountains such as Taihe Mountain, Dabie Mountain, Maoshan Mountain, and Funiu Mountain. Everywhere he went, he humbly consulted farmers, hunters, fishermen, pharmacists, etc., collected various drug specimens, and wrote millions of words of investigation and interview notes, thus accumulating a wealth of practical experience.

He carefully studied and referred to 41 kinds of herbal monographs, and absorbed the essence of various materia medica. It was not until 1578 that the 52-volume, more than 1.9 million-word scientific masterpiece - "Compendium of Materia Medica" was completed.

The book "Compendium of Materia Medica" records a total of 1,892 kinds of medicines, contains more than 10,000 prescriptions, and also attaches 1,100 pictures of animals and plants, covering a wide range and rich content. This work is still one of the important medical reference books for doctors throughout the ages.

Li Shizhen also had a lot of incomplete medical information in the society at that time, and everyone's understanding of some herbal medicines was not comprehensive, so he made it up, and the Compendium of Materia Medica, a masterpiece, was also a contribution to us. Let everyone know some Chinese herbal medicine.

Li Shizhen is a pharmacist full of realistic spirit; In order to complete the arduous task of revising the Materia Medica, he traveled almost all over the famous rivers and mountains in Hubei Province, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and other places, and traveled no less than 10,000 miles. At the same time, he consulted more than 800 books, and after three revisions, he finally compiled the "Compendium of Materia Medica" at the age of 6l (1578 AD).

In the Song Dynasty, there were already collisions with many cultures, and many drugs were introduced, so Li Shizhen began to compile the "Compendium of Materia Medica" in order to let people know.

Li Shizhen compiled the "Compendium of Materia Medica" during the period before and after his tenure in Tai Hospital.

After reading a large number of herbal books, Li Shizhen found that there were mistakes in many places and decided to recompile a book on herbal medicine!

In the process of practicing medicine, Li Shizhen found that many books on materia medica were confusing and there were discrepancies in the drug records, so he decided to recompile the compendium of materia medica.