A Catalog of Benevolent Items: Li Shizhen’s Compendium of Classical Chinese Knowledge

Distills ten volumes, four dictionaries, and 1,800 years of knowledge into an authoritative introduction to the Ben cao gang mu.

The Ben cao gang mu 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 Ben cao gang mu, 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.

Paul U. Unschuld is Professor and Director of the Institute for the Theory, History, and Ethics of Chinese Life Sciences at Charité - Medical University, Berlin. His previous books include Medicine in China: A History of Ideas and What Is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Health Care.