Bencao Gangmu

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The Compendium of Materia Medica is a pharmaceutical text written by Li Shizhen (1518-1593 AD) during the Ming Dynasty of China. This edition was published in 1593.

Bencao Gangmu (

中文:

), also known as Compendium of Materia Medica, is a Chinese materia medica work written by Li Shizhen in Ming Dynasty. It is a work epitomizing materia medica (本草) in the Ming Dynasty. The Bencao Gangmu is regarded as the most complete and comprehensive medical book ever written in the history of traditional Chinese medicine. It lists all the plants, animals, minerals, and other objects that were believed to have medicinal properties.

Title

The Bencao Gangmu title, which Unschuld (1986:145) translates as "Materia Medica, Arranged according to Drug Descriptions and Technical Aspects," uses two Chinese compounds. Bencao ("roots and herbs; based on herbs, pharmacopeia, materia medica") combines ben (本 "root; origin; basis") and cao (草 "grass; plant; herb"). Gangmu ("detailed outline; table of contents") combines gang (綱 "main rope, hawser; main threads, essential principles") and mu (目 "eye; look; category, division").

The characters 綱 and 目 were later used as "class" and "order" respectively in biological classification.

History

Li Shizhen completed the first draft of the text in 1578, after conducting readings of 800 other medical reference books and carrying out 30 years of field study. For this and many other achievements Li Shizhen is being compared to the Shennong, a mythological God in Chinese myth who taught them about agriculture and herbal medicine.

Contents

The Compendium of Materia Medica has 53 volumes in total:

1. At the very beginning is the table of contents, containing a list of entries included and 1,160 hand drawn diagrams to serve as illustration.

2. Volume 1 to 4 — an 'index' (序例) and a comprehensive list of herbs that would treat the most common sickness (百病主治藥).

3. Volume 5 to 53 — the main content of the text, containing 1,892 distinct herbs, of which 374 was added by Li himself. There are 11,096 side prescriptions to treat common illness (8,160 of which is compiled or collected by Li).

The text is written in almost 2 million Chinese characters, classified into 16 divisions and 60 orders. For every herb there are entries on names, detailed description of appearance and odor, nature, medical function, effects and side recipes etc.

Value

With the publication of the Compendium of Materia Medica, not only did it improve the classification of how traditional medicine was compiled and formatted, but it was also a important medium in improving the credibility and scientific values of biology classification of both plants and animals.

The compendium corrected many mistakes and false understandings of the nature of herbs and illness. Li also included many new herbs, added his own discovery in certain drugs, their effectiveness and function, as well as more detailed description according to experiments. It also has notes and records on general medical data and medical history.

Compendium of Materia Medica is also more than a pharmaceutical text, for it contains information so vast that it covered topics in biology, chemistry, geography, mineralogy, geology, history, and even mining and astronomy, which would seem to have little to do with herbal medicine. It has been translated into more than 20 languages and spread all over the world. Even now it is still in print and used as a reference book.

Controversy

Compendium of Materia Medica also contains information that have since been proven to be false due to scientific and technical limitations at the time. For example, it claimed that lead is not toxic.

See also

• Pharmacognosy
• Chinese herbology
• Yaoxing Lun
• Traditional Chinese medicine
• Li Shizhen
• Mellified Man

References

• Luo Xiwen, tr. Bencao Gangmu: Compendium of Materia Medica. 6 vols. Foreign Languages Press. 2003. ISBN 7-119-03260-7. (Review, Edward B. Jelks)
• Unschuld, Paul U. Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics. University of California Press. 1986. ISBN 0-520-05025-8

External links

• Chinese source text at zh.wikisource.org (see also an automated translation)
• Bencao gangmu 本草綱目, ChinaKnowledge article
• Bencao Gangmu Materia Medica, ChinaPage article
• Li Shizhen: Icon of Chinese medicine, Association for Asian Research article
• Pen ts'ao kang mu (The Great Herbal), page from 1672 edition, National Library of Medicine

de:Ben cao gang mu