Foreword: In the long river of history, there are many people who have flowed for hundreds of generations, and they have all made achievements in their respective fields that have attracted the attention of the world. They had profound wisdom, strong perseverance, and great ambitions; they made outstanding contributions to the development of the society at that time, left valuable classics for future generations, and had a profound impact on the development of future generations.
Today, the historical figure we want to know is a man of great achievements in the field of medicine that has amazed the world.
He was a well-known healer at that time; he stepped on thousands of rivers and mountains, walked through wind, frost, rain and snow, weathered cold and summer, and guarded a lone lamp; only to cast the classics of the world, benefit the people of the world, and bless future generations.
He, that is, Li Shizhen, his "Compendium of Materia Medica" is a collection of Materia Medica before the Ming Dynasty, the first use of the compendium system for the classification of drugs, this kind of writing style, created the first Materia Medica works in the past, has a profound impact on the medical and natural science research of later generations.
Why write about the character of Li Shizhen? What I learned from previous books is that I only know Li Shizhen's work "Compendium of Materia Medica", but I know nothing about his origin, the dynasty, and the significance of the "Compendium of Materia Medica" for the society at that time and for future generations.
So today, let's walk into the world of Li Shizhen and the Compendium of Materia Medica.
One: A young dream, determined to practice medicine
Li Shizhen (July 3, 1518 - 1593), the character Dongbi, in his later years, called himself a native of The Lake, Hubei, a famous physician, pharmacist, and naturalist of the Ming Dynasty, known as "Medicine Sage", and "Medical Saint" Wan Mi Zhai, in ancient times, there was "Wan Mi Zhai place, Li Shizhen's medicine".
He was born into a family that had been practicing medicine for generations, and his father was a famous local doctor named Li Yanwen.
Regarding the birth of Li Shizhen, there is a bizarre legend called "Legend of Rain Lake".
It is rumored that on the day Li Shizhen was born, his father Li Yanwen was fishing in the lake, but it was very strange that usually Li Lao's luck was good, and he returned with a full load every time, but that time he could not catch fish, until it was almost dark, when Li Yanwen was ready to pack up and go home, he pulled up the last fishing net and saw that there was still no fish in the net, and there was a big stone.
Li Yanwen looked at the stone and sighed: Stone, stone, I have no wrongs and no hatred with you, why are you teasing me today? It was already enough to worry, but now it is more than sad. But unexpectedly, the stone suddenly spoke: stone, stone, come to celebrate the joy without worry. Mr. Lady is about to set the moon, I don't know what Mr. asks for?
It turned out that this stone was the god of rain lake. Li Yanwen hurried home to see, just at this time, Li Shizhen was born. Therefore, Li Yanwen named his son "Shi Zhen".
That night, Li Yanwen had another dream, dreaming that the immortal Tie abducted Li to come to Daoxi and said: "Shi Zhen Shi Zhen, a hundred diseases can be diagnosed." Be my disciple and spread my reputation. ”
This is the origin of the name "Li Shizhen".
Li Shizhen was born in a family of doctors, loved medicine since childhood, liked to treat people, and was not keen on the official field. In ancient China, the purpose of young people's study was to be able to obtain meritorious titles, add officials to the knighthood, and shine on the lintel. Practitioners, especially folk doctors, are of extremely low status and are called "lowly karma" or "trails".
Therefore, Li Yanwen decided not to let his son go his own way, bent on making Li Shizhen study hard, obtain a meritorious name, and honor his ancestors. Under the supervision of his father, Li Shizhen read the scriptures for several years, and when he was fourteen years old, he passed the Xiucai examination, but he did not want to continue to read at all, his dream was not to become a scholar, he did not want to become an official, he did not want to get rich, but like his father, to be a healer. Therefore, he told his father Li Yanwen that he did not want to study and study medicine, and Li Yanwen told him: "It is difficult to study medicine, it is a matter of life." ”
After that, Li Shizhen went to Wuchang three times to take the exam, but none of them won the test.
After that, Li Shizhen made up his mind to inherit his father's business and abandon Confucianism to pursue medical practice; he did not want to spend time in those piles of words. Therefore, he struggled to write a book and wrote: "The body is like a boat against the current, and the heart is stronger than iron and stone." I hope that my father will be full of children's aspirations, and I will not be afraid of difficulties until I die. ”
Li Yan heard that his attitude was so resolute, so he agreed to his request to study medicine. Since then, Li Shizhen has followed his father Li Yan to smell the wind and rain, practice medicine and see doctors, and the medical name is becoming more and more popular.
Second: The benevolence of the healer is well known
In 1551, during the reign of Emperor Jiajing of the Ming Dynasty, Li Shizhen was already 33 years old at the time, and was recommended to become an official physician because he accidentally cured the illness of the son of Zhu Houkun, the king of Fushun, and was recommended to work in the Tai Hospital in the thirty-fifth year of Ming Jiajing (1556). Awarded the position of "Tai Hospital Judge". Three years later, he was recommended to go to The Beijing Rentai Hospital for sentencing. After one year of service, he resigned and returned to his hometown.
During his work at tai hospital, Li Shizhen often went in and out of the tai hospital pharmacy and the imperial medicine store, and had the opportunity to enjoy precious medical classics such as the royal collection, which broadened his horizons and enriched his pharmacological knowledge. It can be said that the work experience in Tai Hospital has brought far-reaching influence to Li Shizhen's life and laid a solid foundation for the writing of the "Compendium of Materia Medica" in the future.
Later, Li Shizhen returned to his hometown and founded DongbiTang, where he sat down to practice medicine while devoting himself to the investigation and research of drugs.
Li Shizhen was one of the few famous doctors in the world at that time, and he had a pure and benevolent heart. He gave diagnosis and treatment to all those who were sick, no matter how noble or low, and treated the sick with close relatives. When encountering poor people who look down on the sick, he often does not charge a medical fee, which is the true benevolence of the healer.
The image comes from the Internet
One day, Li Shizhen and his apprentice were walking by the doctor, passing by the lake mouth, and just saw a group of people carrying coffins out of the funeral. But the coffin has been bleeding outwards, Li Shizhen went forward to check and found that the blood flowing out of the coffin was not bruised, but blood; so it was determined that the people in the coffin were not dead people, but living people.
So he hurriedly stopped everyone and persuaded the master to open the coffin for autopsy; he first massaged the people in the coffin, and then used the principles of Chinese medicine to perform needles; sure enough, the woman in the coffin was saved by him, and everyone looked at each other in disbelief.
Soon after, the woman successfully gave birth to a baby, and everyone understood that the woman had fallen into a state of suspended animation due to difficult childbirth before, and it was Li Shizhen who found out in time and saved her.
This is the story about Li Shizhen's "dead man diagnosis and life".
And Li Shizhen also has a story of "living people diagnosing death", as follows:
It is said that one day, the son of a pharmacy owner jumped up and down again after eating and drinking a meal; after Li Shizhen saw him, he told him: Little brother, you can't live for three hours, hurry up and go home.
After the son of the pharmacy owner heard the words, wasn't he cursing me to death? So he scolded Li Shizhen incessantly; and when everyone listened to what Li Shizhen said, they didn't believe it, but just listened to it as a joke.
However, after three hours, the man did indeed die. It turned out that after the person had eaten enough, he jumped and broke his intestines, damaged his internal organs, and led to death.
In the long-term medical practice, Li Shizhen cured many difficult and complicated diseases, accumulated a wealth of medical knowledge, and laid a solid foundation for his later work "Compendium of Materia Medica".
Three: Taste all the grasses and travel thousands of miles
Li Shizhen grew up following his father Li Yanwen and was familiar with medical books, and after he aspired to practice medicine, he read a large number of medical classics, especially books about "Materia Medica", and every time he read a medical book about "Materia Medica", he was always a hundred times more energetic, and he forgot to eat and sleep.
He was familiar with medical books, but he was not superstitious. When practicing medicine, he only believed in practice.
Li Shizhen read a vast sea of medical texts and did a lot of preparatory work. After that, he walked out of Dongbi Hall, put on straw shoes, carried the medicine basket, picked up the medicine hoe, took the paper and pen, and began the long march. He got up early and greedy, tirelessly threw himself into the embrace of nature, and he wanted to know the truth in practice.
While visiting, he recorded what the people saw and heard, and recorded all the pharmaceutical knowledge he learned. Not afraid of the harsh cold, not afraid of the hardships of the mountain road, over the mountains and mountains, footprints throughout Hubei, Henan, Hebei, Anhui, Jiangsu, Jiangxi and other places. He did not hesitate to ask, visited the mountains and remote lands, asked and studied with the old peasants, and gained extensive medical knowledge in the mountains and wilderness of all parts of the motherland and in the ocean of the wisdom of the masses.
The medicine book says that Chai Hu and Mai Dong can cure cold and heat, and can suppress cough and moisturize the lungs. Therefore, when he had a fever and cough, he used chai hu and winter wheat, but there was no effect, and later he used skullcap to cure it.
In order to carry out scientific practice and in-depth study of pharmacology, Li Shizhen often risked his life to personally try drugs and swallow toxic drugs.
One day, he walked into a valley and suddenly saw a yellow flower blooming all over the mountain. He asked the surrounding woodcutters what kind of plant it was, and the woodcutter told him it was a "mandala flower."
"Mandala flower seeds" are poisonous plants, swallowed with wine will make people laugh for a long time, can not control themselves; then more trance, like drunken people, let people fall into a fairyland, like a dream, but after waking up, do not remember their own behavior.
Li Shizhen was excited in his heart, and a bold conjecture surged into his heart: Could it be that the long-lost famous Eastern Han Dynasty doctor Hua Tuo's "Ma Boiling Scatter" was developed from mandala flowers? So, he collected a large number of mandala flowers, swallowed them himself after returning, experienced the whole experience of swallowing mandala flowers, and then recorded the dosage and degree of anesthesia.
Therefore, the secret of "ma boiling scatter" a thousand years ago has finally been solved.
Another time, Li Shizhen finished digging medicine and stopped at a teahouse on the way back. It was a hot day, and there were several shirtless men playing cards in the teahouse, and one shirtless man sat right against the wall, licking his fingers on his lips every time he played cards. Suddenly, the shirtless man felt an itch on his back and scratched it with his fingers, several times in a row. The shirtless man felt very strange, so he looked back and saw that there was a hole in the wall behind him, and there was a snake in the hole, which was already half dead.
Li Shizhen was very strange, turning the snake over and over, not knowing why the snake suddenly died. It wasn't until I saw the shirtless man's back that the reason for the itch on the back of the shirtless man was that the snake had been licking his vest with his tongue, and the shirtless man scratched the itch with his fingers dipped in saliva, and the saliva was licked into the mouth by the snake, and the snake was frozen by the saliva.
Since then, whenever someone is bitten by a snake, the first step in emergency treatment is to put the herb in the mouth and chew it and then apply it to the site of the snake bite.
To this day, this method of treating snake venom is still in use, and we can often see such a bridge in TV dramas.
Not only that, Li Shizhen also has considerable research on animals. For example, the living habits of pangolins and their medicinal value. There is also the study of the white flower snake and medicinal treatment, which supplements the records of the "Compendium of Materia Medica".
In addition, for mineralogy, Li Shizhen also has a certain involvement, he found that lead is toxic, mercury is not a drug into immortality, taking mercury not only can not be immortal, but also toxic, long-term accumulation of taking will cause cancer.
Li Shizhen is not afraid of difficulties and obstacles, and crosses mountains and mountains. In the past few years, I have traveled all over the great rivers and mountains of the motherland, and while walking, I have collected a large amount of information along the way and recorded them in the book and sorted them into books. He was not ashamed to ask, asked and learned from the people, and many of the principles of drugs and treatment methods were learned from the folk.
For example, there is an old woman, suffering from constipation for 30 years, multi-treatment, but did not get better, Li Shizhen used folk remedies to quickly cure her disease. There is also a woman nasal bleeding, can not stop day and night, many folk doctors are helpless, and it is Li Shizhen who uses garlic slices to apply the patient's foot and heart, curing this disease. These folk remedies were all learned by Li Shizhen from the folk after several years of traveling thousands of miles.
Fourth: Immerse yourself in writing, and eventually become a classic
Li Shizhen read a large number of medical classics, coupled with decades of practice of medicine, found that there are many errors in the ancient Materia Medica, which will mislead future generations of doctors, many doctors only know how to prescribe medicine according to the book, never ask whether the book is correct, the result of the wrong prescription in the book led to a number of medical accidents, and even because of the wrong medicine to make people die. Li Shizhen has seen such a heart-wrenching event happen more than once; Even Li Shizhen himself was once misled. Almost caused a catastrophe.
It is rumored that once, shortly after Li Shizhen practiced medicine, there was a big mistake and almost caused a human life.
It is said that one day, there was a patient with a high fever and no sweating, and a severe headache, and asked Li Shizhen to come to the doctor. Li Shizhen rushed to the patient's home and diagnosed the patient with cold, and he should sweat first. Therefore, before grabbing the medicine, let the patient's family member fry ginger water to drink, and then wrap the quilt tightly, after sweating, the disease will be alleviated.
Li Shizhen prescribed a good medicine and prepared to go back, the patient suddenly asked him whether he could eat eel, Li Shizhen replied casually: "It is okay to cook eel with ginger, as long as you sweat." ”
Not long after Li Shizhen returned home, the patient's son hurried to say that after his father ate the eel boiled with ginger, his pupils were dilated, his face turned pale, his tongue was knotted, and he was already out of breath and less in.
When Li Shizhen heard this, he was shocked. Fortunately, Li Shizhen's father, Li Yanwen, was alive at the time, and after he heard about it, he grabbed a handful of herbs and went to the patient's home.
After the patient ate the herbs that Li Yanwen detoxified, he ate the medicine to cure the cold, and after only three days of effort, he was cured and went to the ground.
Li Shizhen was very strange, so he asked his father, who told him that boiling eel with ginger would poison people, and Li Shizhen was enlightened, as it was.
Since then, Li Shizhen has had the idea of re-compiling a new cursive book to avoid such a tragedy.
He discussed this matter with his father, Li Yanwen, who told him: "Revising the Materia Medica is a huge project, and it will consume a great deal of financial, material, and manpower, and it is a very difficult thing to accomplish."
When some people in society heard that he was going to re-cultivate Materia Medica, they all said dismissively: "It is simply arrogant to move the classics of the ancients." His idea of writing a book was ridiculed by others, but the pain of the patient kept appearing before his eyes. As a result, he became more determined by his ideals.
In 1552, that is, in the thirty-first year of Emperor Jiajing of the Ming Dynasty, Li Shizhen borrowed the name of Zhu Xi's "Compendium of General Studies" and set the title of the book "Compendium of Materia Medica" and began to compile it, taking the "Evidence Class Materia Medica" as the model and referring to more than 800 books. During this period, from the forty-fourth year of Jiajing, he left home many times to investigate, and his footprints spread throughout Many famous mountains and rivers such as Hunan, Sichuan, and Guangxi, and clarified many difficult problems.
Kung Fu pays off. After nearly thirty years of angry reading and hard work, in 1578 AD, that is, the sixth year of the Ming Dynasty, Li Shizhen finally completed the first draft of the Compendium of Materia Medica at the age of 61. After 10 years of revision, a total of nearly 40 years, it was only after that a shining pearl in my Chinese pharmacy treasure house was produced- the "Compendium of Materia Medica".
This is a huge work that collects the culmination of medicines, and for the first time uses the compendium system to classify drugs, creating a precedent for successive generations of Materia Medica works. The Compendium of Materia Medica consists of 16 parts, 52 volumes, and about 1.9 million words. The book records 1892 flavors of animal, plant and mineral drugs; including 1195 species of plants; a total of 11096 ancient pharmacists and folk unilateral recipes; more than 1100 drug morphological diagrams attached to the front of the book; and 374 kinds of folk prescriptions are summarized, with 1096 prescriptions from ancient times.
This great work, absorbing the essence of the Materia Medica works of the past, corrects the previous mistakes as much as possible, supplements the deficiencies, and has many important discoveries and breakthroughs. It is the most systematic, complete and scientific medical work in China until the 16th century.
On the day of the completion of the book, Li Shizhen had reached the age of ancient rarity, and this book was the crystallization of his life's work.
After the "Compendium of Materia Medica" was completed, due to its huge scale and too many words, it could not be printed at all in the social environment at that time. Later, Li Shizhen asked to meet Wang Shizhen, a famous literary scholar of the Ming Dynasty, who composed the "Compendium of Materia Medica": the essence of sexual theory, the general code of the grid, the secret book of the emperor, and the heavy treasure of the subjects.
At this point, the Compendium of Materia Medica was published.
Not long after the compilation of the Compendium of Materia Medica, Li Shizhen passed away, that is to say, he did not see the great work he had created with his life's painstaking efforts.
The Compendium of Materia Medica was officially published three years after Li Shizhen's death and was widely circulated.
In later generations, it was also translated into Japanese, Latin, German, French, Russian, English, Korean and other languages, and was known as the "Masterpiece of Oriental Medicine".
The famous British biologist Darwin commented that the "Compendium of Materia Medica" is: an ancient Chinese encyclopedia.
In addition, the Compendium of Materia Medica is also recognized as a world-wide outstanding contribution to the world's natural sciences. It is a summary of Chinese pharmacology for thousands of years. This pharmacopoeia, both in terms of its rigorous scientific classification and in terms of the number of drugs it contains and its smooth and vivid writing, far exceeds any ancient Materia Medica.
Li Shizhen has devoted his life to medical research and made great contributions to the Chinese nation and the world's medicine, and the "Compendium of Materia Medica" he forged, as a classic work in the history of world medicine, has been circulated at home and abroad for the benefit of tens of millions of future generations, and is worthy of the admiration of all generations in future generations.
But today, many of us have forgotten Li Shizhen, a great historical figure, and forgotten his great contributions to the history of the famous Chinese people and even the world.
Many of today's young Chinese people have forgotten what our ancestors did for us and what precious wealth they left for future generations.
Aren't those great historical figures worth pursuing? Shouldn't we remember our ancestors and build on the past?
I think that future generations should not forget Li Shizhen, a great historical figure. Because without his unremitting efforts in the past 40 years, there would be no greatest work in history, "Compendium of Materia Medica", how could it be blessed for future generations?
postscript:
A farmer, wearing straw shoes, carrying a medicine basket, traveling far into the mountains and wilderness, visiting famous doctors and Confucians, and writing a legend for Chinese history;
Like a countercurrent boat, the heart is stronger than iron and stone; with dreams, walking into the mountains, wind and rain, tasting hundreds of grasses, waving an immortal classic that affects the world, and the name Li Shizhen is engraved into the memory of history along with the "Compendium of Materia Medica".
At this point, the story of Li Shizhen and the "Compendium of Materia Medica" is coming to an end, if you want to make a summary of Li Shizhen's life, I think there is a sentence in the program "China in the Classics" that is very appropriate:
Treading on thousands of rivers and mountains, wearing wind and frost, rain and snow, weathering cold and summer, guarding a lone lamp, casting a classic of the world, benefiting the people of the world, and blessing future generations.
Such a person deserves the great respect of future generations; such a work deserves to be called a "great work of eternity."