One day more than 400 years ago, a doctor looked at a stack of medical books on his desk and sighed: there are many wrong names and unclear words, which is really not a good thing for patients.
He decided to write a new book: correcting fallacies, collecting medicinal materials, and effective prescriptions. In the following decades, he traveled to thousands of rivers and mountains, tasted hundreds of herbs, and exhausted his efforts, and finally completed a medical masterpiece that saved countless lives.
It is called "Compendium of Materia Medica" and is known as the "Classic of Oriental Medicine". This person is the "Medicine Saint" Li Shizhen.
One
In 1518, Li Shizhen was born into a medical family.
His father's name is Li Wenyan, a famous local doctor. Usually, the courtyard of the Li family grows many herbs, and when he can't keep busy, Li Wenyan will take the Li Shizhen brothers to his small clinic, teach his son to study, practice medicine, and occasionally let the children help copy the prescription.
Li Shizhen likes to study medicine more and more. Usually muffled to see how his father treats people, when his father goes to the clinic, he will secretly open the medical book and carefully speculate, often forgetting the time; In "Erya", there are many explanations about animals and plants, and Li Shizhen also reads them with relish.
One day, Li Wenyan took his eldest son out to see a doctor, and Li Shizhen was left alone in the clinic. Suddenly, a patient with persistent diarrhea came to see him. Looking at the patient's painful appearance, Li Shizhen boldly prescribed medicine to treat him.
When Li heard that he came back and heard about it, at first he was afraid that his son would cause trouble, but after reading the formula, he was surprised and delighted: his son not only read a lot of medical books, but also prescribed the right medicine, and if he became a doctor, he might be able to give full play to his talent.
In ancient times, the social status of doctors was not very high. Li Wenyan originally did not want his son to study medicine, but could read all the classics and pass the imperial examination to seek fame. When Li Shizhen was 14 years old, he also passed the Xiucai exam, but then went to the exam and fell off the list.
When he was about 20 years old, he also had a serious illness, was tortured to death, and endured hardships to save a life. Li Shizhen, who had no intention of pursuing a career, was determined to practice medicine and not let others suffer his pain anymore.
In order to gain his father's support, he wrote a poem to express his determination: "Like a ship against the current, the heart is stronger than iron and stone." I hope that my father will be all children, and I am not afraid of difficulties until death. ”
After choosing the goal of studying medicine, we must do our best to treat diseases and save people, and this ambition will remain unswerving for life. For the rest of his life, Li Shizhen has been practicing his vow.
Two
Due to his superb medical skills and noble medical ethics, Li Shizhen quickly became famous in all directions. But he soon discovered that there were errors in some ancient medical books, which caused many unnecessary troubles for doctors and people.
He wanted to rewrite a medical classic. In 1552, Li Shizhen began to write, thanks to his experience in the Imperial Hospital, he was able to identify medicinal materials from various places and collect a lot of information.
However, the problem that gave Li Shizhen a headache soon came: the names of the drugs in those medical books were mixed, and because the author did not investigate the field, he just copied it back and forth, and finally explained it in a vague way, which is incomprehensible.
For example, there is a medicinal herb called "Yuanzhi", Tao Hongjing said that it looks like ephedra, but the color is green and blooms white flowers, but Ma Zhi in the Song Dynasty thought it looked like Daqing, and said that Tao Hongjing did not understand this medicine at all... There are many, many more in similar situations.
Li Shizhen was determined to see with his own eyes what was going on. While collecting information on various drugs, he conducted research. Since then, he has left his hometown many times and successively traveled to Anhui, Henan, Hebei and other places to collect drug specimens and prescriptions, carefully recording the characteristics of each medicinal herb.
Whether it is an uninhabited deep mountain or a bottomless lake, as long as there is a need for medicinal materials, Li Shizhen will run over without hesitation, fearless of hardships and dangers.
Three
During the entire investigation, in order to identify the medicinal properties and pharmacology, he did not hesitate to try the medicine and taste all the herbs.
Some people say that there is a "mandala flower", one stem straight up to four or five feet high, the flower is very similar to morning glory, and picking wine and drinking will make people dance unconsciously. He was skeptical, so he went to many places to find the mandala flower, and decided to try it himself to see its effects.
So, Li Shizhen prepared mandala flower wine and called his apprentices to drink it together. Just drank a little, he was already quite drunk, the apprentice couldn't help laughing when he looked at the master's appearance, and finally the two also laughed and danced, verifying the authenticity of the folk saying.
He wrote this scene into the "Compendium of Materia Medica" and introduced the anesthetic effect of the mandala flower, "Cut the sores and moxibustion fire, it is advisable to take this first, then you will not feel bitter." "The experience of ordinary people using mandala flowers for surgical anesthesia is a concise explanation.
During the journey, fishermen, farmers, tanners, hunters, etc. were his teachers. For example, the white flower snake is a special product of Shezhou, and the tip of the tooth is highly poisonous, mainly treating diseases such as wind paralysis and convulsions. Li Shizhen risked following the snake catcher to the deep mountains, caught a white flower snake, carefully distinguished, and recorded it in detail.
According to legend, he also investigated all the way and treated the common people all the way without asking for remuneration. There was a woman with nasal bleeding that could not be stopped all day and night, and the people around her were helpless. After Li Shizhen learned more about the condition, she taught her family to apply garlic slices to the patient's heart, and soon the blood stopped flowing. This home remedy was collected by him from the people.
Four
After about 27 years of cold and summer, Li Shizhen finally completed the medical classic in his mind, which was later the world-famous "Compendium of Materia Medica". This year, he was 61 years old.
This masterpiece has a total of more than 1.9 million words, and every word is soaked with Li Shizhen's painstaking efforts.
He broke the classification system of upper, middle and lower products that has been followed for more than a thousand years since the "Shennong Materia Medica", and divided the drugs into water, fire, earth, gold and stone, a total of 16 parts in the "Compendium of Materia Medica", and systematically described the knowledge of various drugs, including correction, interpretation, treatment, prescription, etc., and the details are appropriate.
In terms of content, the book contains 1892 kinds of drugs, with more than 10,000 prescriptions and more than 1100 illustrations. Its scale is greater than any previous herbal work.
In addition, the book pioneered the classification system according to the natural properties of drugs, which is also one of the important methods of modern biological taxonomy, a century and a half earlier than Linnaeus's "Natural System", the founder of modern plant taxonomy.
Perhaps, there is no need to use too many beautiful words for the significance of the appearance of this magnum opus. All we need to know is that it has saved countless lives since it appeared and continues to work, and that's enough.
The praise of the "Oriental Medicine Classic" is well deserved by the "Compendium of Materia Medica".
Five
After the "Compendium of Materia Medica" was finalized, in order to publish the book as soon as possible, Li Shizhen ran around despite his old age and infirmity, and pleaded with Wang Shizhen, a famous literary scholar of the Ming Dynasty, to write the foreword, and finally found a bookseller who agreed to engrave it.
He had not been able to see the magnum opus in action. In the early autumn of 1593, Li Shizhen passed away, at which time the "Compendium of Materia Medica" was still being engraved by Hu Chenglong and others, and it was officially published three years later.
Wang Shizhen gave a high evaluation to the "Compendium of Materia Medica", "the essence of sexual reason, the general code of lattice, the secret book of emperors, and the treasure of subjects". People remembered Li Shizhen's character and merits, and respectfully called him "Medicine Saint".
Li Shizhen's rigorous academic attitude has also been praised to this day. When he studies each medicine, he always first refers to the herbal classics, evaluates the similarities and differences, and then personally observes the experiment and verifies it, "where no one has been before", this is the spirit of his research.
How many 27 years can there be in life? In order to complete the "Compendium of Materia Medica", Li Shizhen, who was already a famous doctor, gave up the stable life at his fingertips and lived like a homeless man: he had been to barren mountains, lived in broken temples, and was almost poisoned several times because he tried medicine.
However, he always firmly believed that if the "Compendium of Materia Medica" could be revised well, all the people would be blessed, and it would be worth the hardships.
Many, many years later, the 1948 Geneva Declaration of Medicine said, "As I was absorbed into the medical profession, I solemnly pledged to dedicate my life to the service of mankind." Li Shizhen didn't see this passage, but he did it.
The benevolence of the healer, his life, is the best interpretation of these four words.
(Source: China News Network)