Distills ten volumes, four dictionaries, and 1,800 years of knowledge into an authoritative introduction to the
Ben cao gang mu
.
The
was the world’s most comprehensive encyclopedia of natural history and medicine when it was published in China in 1593. In fifty-two chapters, the physician Li Shizhen recorded two millennia of medical observations, interpreting the wide-ranging uses of plants, animals, minerals, and artificial substances and including countless verbatim quotations along with his own evaluations.
Edited and translated by Paul U. Unschuld,
A Catalog of Benevolent Items
provides thoughtfully curated selections from the
, organized by theme. This anthology offers little-known details of China’s historical knowledge of nature; traditional Chinese medicine and its theoretical foundations; social and cultural facets of ancient Chinese civilization not documented elsewhere; and the information management of a sixteenth-century Chinese scholar.