Li Shizhen

Li Shizhen the Chinese physician and naturalist of the Ming dynasty (1518-1593) whose great pharmacological compendium, the Compendium of Materia Medica, catalogued nearly two thousand medicinal substances and became the most comprehensive work of its kind in the premodern world. He is regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of Chinese medicine and botany.

Early Life and Medical Family

Li Shizhen was born in 1518 in Qichun, in present-day Hubei province, into a family of physicians. His father and grandfather practised medicine, and from childhood he was surrounded by herbs, prescriptions and the practical lore of healing. Although his father hoped he would rise through the imperial examinations to a government post, his repeated failure in those examinations turned him back toward the family profession.

He received a thorough classical education, reading the Confucian classics, history and philosophy, and this grounding served him well in later life when he undertook the systematic study of medical and botanical texts. After abandoning the examination path he devoted himself entirely to medicine, and he became a respected physician in his native region, treating rich and poor alike and building a reputation for both skill and honesty.

He was appointed to a post in the imperial medical institution in Beijing and later served in a provincial medical office, but he found official life uncongenial and soon returned to practice and study. His real vocation was research, and he spent decades travelling through the countryside to examine plants, interview farmers and herbalists, and test the knowledge he had gathered from books.

The Compendium of Materia Medica

The Bencao Gangmu, or Compendium of Materia Medica, is Li Shizhen's masterpiece. He worked on it for roughly twenty-seven years, completing the text in 1578, though it was not printed until 1596, three years after his death. In it he set out to correct the errors and fill the gaps of the earlier pharmacological literature, and the result was a work of unprecedented scope and order.

The compendium describes some 1,892 medicinal substances, of which more than three hundred were newly added by Li Shizhen himself, and it includes more than eleven thousand prescriptions. Every entry gives the name and its variants, the source, the method of preparation, the properties of the drug, and the uses to which it had been put. The work is illustrated with hundreds of drawings and arranged according to a rational system that classified drugs by their nature and origin.

Its organisation was one of its great innovations. Li Shizhen divided the materials into categories such as water, fire, earth, minerals, plants, animals and objects, and within the plants he created further divisions based on observable characteristics rather than on older and vaguer schemes. This effort to classify by form and structure gave the book a scientific quality that impressed later readers, including naturalists in Europe.

Method and Field Research

What distinguished Li Shizhen from many compilers of his age was his insistence on direct observation. Rather than trusting the printed word alone, he travelled widely, examined plants and animals with his own eyes, questioned farmers, hunters, fishermen and herb gatherers, and experimented with remedies. He dissected specimens, compared related species, and sought to reconcile the conflicting claims of earlier writers by testing them against reality.

He was careful to distinguish what he had seen himself from what he had merely read, and he recorded doubts and uncertainties honestly. Where the ancients disagreed, he weighed the evidence and often proposed a resolution, and where their accounts were plainly mistaken he corrected them. This critical and empirical spirit is what marks him out as a forerunner of modern scientific method in natural history.

He also studied the literature of earlier ages in great depth, drawing on medical texts, alchemical works and regional chronicles. His learning was broad enough that he could trace the history of a drug through many centuries, and his mastery of the sources gave the compendium an authority that no single traveller's notebook could have achieved. He combined the scholar's command of texts with the observer's eye for fact.

Other Medical Contributions

Beyond the compendium, Li Shizhen wrote on the diagnosis of disease by the pulse, a subject of central importance in Chinese medicine. His work on the pulse systematised and clarified the teaching of the older authorities, and his discussion of the various qualities of the pulse and of what they revealed about the internal organs was widely studied by later physicians.

He also concerned himself with the theory of the channels and with the relationship between the organs, and he wrote on fevers, on disorders of the internal organs and on the treatment of women and children. His clinical writings show a practitioner of wide experience who tested theory against the bedside and who valued practical results as highly as elegant doctrine.

In addition he compiled notes on the classics and produced commentaries on works of medicine and natural philosophy. Though the compendium overshadowed these smaller writings, they reveal the same habits of mind: a passion for accuracy, a willingness to question authority, and a conviction that knowledge should be organised so that it could be used and passed on.

Influence and Legacy

The Compendium of Materia Medica was reprinted many times and became the standard reference for Chinese pharmacy. It was carried abroad to Korea and Japan, where it shaped medical practice, and it is said to have been used by European naturalists such as Darwin, who cited it in discussion of the evidence for the transformation of species. It stands among the great scientific compilations of the premodern world.

Li Shizhen is honoured today as one of the founders of the systematic study of Chinese medicine and of botanical science in East Asia. His name is attached to colleges, hospitals and scientific prizes, and a statue of him stands among the monuments to the history of science in China. Physicians and scholars alike return to his work for both its information and its method.

He died in 1593, shortly before the publication of the book that made him famous. He is remembered as a man who united the traditions of the scholar and the healer, and who insisted that knowledge must be tested. His patient, critical labour gave later generations a foundation on which the study of medicine and of nature could build, and his reputation has only grown with the passage of time.

See also

• Traditional Chinese medicine
• Materia medica
• Sun Simiao
• Bencao Gangmu