Compendium of Materia Medica by Li Shizhen
2 min readLi Shizhen(1518-1593) was born in Qizhou (present-day Qichun county) of Hubei province, and inherited the ancestors’ medical knowledge and skills as a physician. In the practice of medicine, he found that the materia medica through theages contained many errors.
Li Shizhen and were likely to harm people’s lives, so he made up his mind to compile a newbook about medicine. He made a further investigation in Wudang mountain in Hubei province, Lushan mountain in Jiangxi province, Maoshan mountain in Jiangsu province and Niushoushan mountain in Nanjing city. He also collected herbal samples as well as folk prescriptions in many areas such as Anhui, Henan and Hebei provinces.
Furthermore, he even made many anatomizations and experiments of pharmacology. Over a period of 27 years from 1552 to 1578, after three times of proofreading, the Chinese medical history witnessed the compilation of Compendium of Materia Medica by Li Shizhen,a huge medicinal masterpiece with the richest contents of his time.
Compendium of Materia Medica was based on the foundation of Classified Materia Medica by Tang Shenwei in Song dynasty. Through decrease, addition, examination and correction,400 new herbs and 8,000 new prescriptions were compiled into a great work in 52 volumes with approximately 1.9 million Chinese characters. Specifically the 60 categories of 16 parts in the book include a collection of 1,892 medicaments,11,096 prescriptions and 1,160 illustrations. The book was innovative in that it created a multilevel taxonomy for materia medica, with the 16 chapters classified as the outline and the 60 categories as the items, sequencing from the smallest to the large-sized, from the lower to the higher valued.A system of outline and category was formed by outlining the authentic materia medica and categorizing their feasible substitutes. This creative system was not only convenient to retrieve, but also created a relatively advanced classification system of medication. In the system, animal medication was classified with the initial evolving idea: bug, scale, shell, birds, beast and human. The book also made a great contribution to the pharmaceutical theory. The great British biologist Charles Darwin, who gathered data about the variation of chicken and the breeding and domestication of goldfish, later praised it as”the encyclopedia of ancient China”.
