Why did Li Shizhen compile the Compendium of Materia Medica ?

Li Shizhen is a native of Hubei and has lived 75 years old, which is a relatively long-lived person. Li Shizhen is regarded as a son inheriting his father's business, and his father is a master herbalist, but doctors at that time were not as popular as they are now, so his father didn't want Li Shizhen to be a doctor anymore. When Li Shizhen was 14 years old, his father once took him to the exam, and he was admitted to Xiucai, but this seems to be Li Shizhen's imperial examination career.

Li Shizhen loves medical skills, and is not keen on exams, and then he took the exam three times, but he did not win, so his father had to accept his fate and let Li Shizhen specialize in medical skills, and Li Shizhen was already a famous doctor in his 20s. Li Shizhen also took the imperial examination first and then studied medicine, which was basically a must-go process for young people at that time.

In 1551, Li Shizhen took over a big job, he cured the son of Zhu Houxi, who was still the king of Fushun at that time, and entered the rank of princes and nobles, and was later recommended to enter the Tai Hospital, which can be regarded as his peak as a doctor. But Li Shizhen was still unwilling to be an official, so he resigned a year later and returned to his hometown to continue practicing medicine. This experience may have become the key to Li Shizhen's writing of the "Compendium of the Morning", because of Li Shizhen's position, he was free to go out of the library and read a large number of ancient classics, which broadened Li Shizhen's horizons, and Li Shizhen found that these ancient medical books had many erroneous records.

In order to benefit all the people, Li Shizhen decided to write a medical book containing the world's herbal medicines. Li Shizhen spent the second half of his life collecting herbs everywhere, and finally wrote and completed the masterpiece "Compendium of Materia Medica".

In order for future generations of doctors to understand the toxicity and medicinal properties of herbal medicines.

1. In the process of writing the "Compendium of Materia Medica", in order to understand the living habits of pangolins, Li Shizhen followed the hunters into the deep mountains and old forests, followed the traces of pangolins, conducted field investigations, and also caught pangolins to dissect them personally.

2. In order to study the detailed characteristics of the mandala, Li Shizhen drank the wine soaked in the mandala and wanted to experience the effect of the mandala. So that in the end, after being poured antidote into the coma, he quickly wrote down the origin, shape, habits, and growth period of the mandala as soon as he woke up, and wrote down how to soak the wine and the effect, dosage, efficacy, reaction process, etc. In this way, another drug that can be used as a clinical anesthetic has been introduced.

3. Li Shizhen is not afraid of high mountains and long roads, not afraid of severe cold and heat, and has traveled all over the famous mountains that produce medicinal materials. 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 medicine information. Li Shizhen started writing in his 30s and wrote the first draft of the "Compendium of Materia Medica" at the age of 54.

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.

How did Li Shizhen compile the Compendium of Materia Medica?

Since 1565, Li Shizhen has gone to Wudang Mountain, Lushan, Maoshan Mountain, Niushoukong Mountain, Huguang, Anhui, Henan, Hebei and other places to collect drug specimens and prescriptions, and worship fishermen, woodcutters, farmers, coachmen, pharmacists, snake catchers as teachers, refer to 925 kinds of books on medicine and other aspects of the past dynasties, archaeological evidence, exhaustive study of physics", record tens of millions of words of notes, and figure out many difficult problems in the dismantling of the book. After 27 cold and summer, the manuscript was changed three times, and the 1.92 million word masterpiece "Compendium of Materia Medica" was completed in the eighteenth year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty (1590).