Li Shizhen

Li Shizhen (1518 to 1593), courtesy name Dongbi, was a Chinese physician, herbalist, pharmacologist and naturalist of the Ming dynasty, born in what is now Qizhou in Hubei. His father was a traditional physician and scholar who urged him toward a government career, but after failing the civil service examination three times he turned to medicine. He spent 27 years on the Compendium of Materia Medica, the Bencao Gangmu, a pharmacology text with 1,892 entries that covers more than 1,800 traditional medicines, with about 1,100 illustrations and 11,000 prescriptions. It also draws on botany, zoology, mineralogy and metallurgy, and he devised several methods for classifying herb components and medicines. He wrote eleven other books, including a study of the pulse and an examination of the eight extra meridians, and the Compendium has been translated into several languages.