Makers › Physician / Medical Master
Ge Hong
Eastern Jin Daoist writer and physician who wrote the Baopuzi on alchemy and immortality and a pocket book of emergency remedies later cited in the discovery of artemisinin
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 Zhichuan · Zi Hao Bao Pu Zi · Ge Xianweng
Ge Hong, courtesy name Zhichuan, came from Jurong in Danyang. He learned alchemy from Zheng Yin, a disciple of his great-uncle Ge Xuan, and then studied under Bao Xuan, governor of Nanhai, whose daughter he married. After fighting for the loyalists against Shi Bing's rising he went to Luoyang in search of rare books rather than claim a reward, and was later made a marquis for the campaign. In old age he asked to be magistrate of Goulou in Jiaozhi, where cinnabar was found, but the governor of Guangzhou kept him back, and he settled on Mount Luofu to make elixirs and write. As Baopuzi he wrote a book whose inner chapters treat immortality and drugs and whose outer chapters treat human affairs, besides a handbook of emergency prescriptions. The History of Jin gives his age at death as eighty-one; another account has sixty-one, placing his life from 283 to 343. Tu Youyou drew on that handbook's recipe of sweet wormwood steeped in water when developing artemisinin.
Life and times
Dates 283 CE–343 CE (by another account died aged 81)