Makers › Physician / Medical Master
Li Shizhen
Ming physician from Qizhou who spent thirty years and three drafts on the Compendium of Materia Medica, a 52-chapter herbal adding 374 new drugs
In a dispensary, a tall wooden cabinet of many small drawers stands behind a stone mortar and pestle, with herbs hanging from the beams; a copper scale, a clay pot on a small lit stove and baskets of leaves sit in front, and one person with a basket walks in the herb garden.
Also known as Zi Dongbi · Hao Binhu
Li Shizhen, courtesy name Dongbi, came from Qizhou (now Qichun, Hubei); his father Li Yanwen was a physician. A keen reader of medical books, he found that the herbals handed down from antiquity had grown to more than 1,500 entries but were full of duplication and confused names. Over thirty years he consulted works by more than eight hundred authors and rewrote his manuscript three times, producing the Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu) in fifty-two chapters. It arranges its drugs in sixteen divisions, adds 374 new ones, and gives each a heading followed by notes on origin, appearance, properties, uses and prescriptions. He held a post as sacrificial officer in the household of the Prince of Chu. He died in 1593 before the book reached the court; his son Li Jianyuan presented it with his father's memorial, and the Wanli Emperor ordered it printed. In 2011 its Jinling edition was entered in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
Life and times
Dates 1518 CE–1593 CE