一本伟大的书，也会有错误吗？李时珍与《本草纲目》

Li Shizhen was born in 1518 in Qizhou, in the area of today's Qichun, Hubei. Several generations of his family were connected with healing and medicinal materials. At the time, a student who passed a series of civil service examinations could gain status and perhaps enter government. Biographical accounts say that Li qualified as a local student at about fourteen - often simplified as becoming a xiucai - but later failed the higher provincial examination three times. Instead of staking his whole life on more exams, he studied medicine with his father, treated people near home, read, and wrote.

Later accounts also place him in the household of the Prince of Chu and briefly connect him with the Imperial Medical Institute in Beijing. Biographies disagree about the exact offices and timing, so we should not turn them into a dramatic tale in which Li cures a prince and is instantly summoned to the palace. They do suggest that he encountered both clinical practice and wider collections of books and materials. He wrote other medical works, including studies of the pulse. His interest in medicine did not suddenly appear in old age.

Nor does leaving the exam path mean his earlier study was useless. Comparing quotations, reading difficult classical prose, and sorting out several things with the same name all required deep training with texts. Li changed roads, but he carried his reading skills into medicine.

Li could spot cases in which earlier writers had confused names, pictures, or materials, and he was willing to place his own disagreement after a quotation. That habit of correction matters. But he had no microscope, modern chemistry, randomized controlled trials, or today's systems of biological classification. Nor could he personally verify every ancient report he included. To cast a wide net, he drew from medicine, history, literature, and tales of the strange. The more material he gathered, the more uneven its reliability became.

The book records not only plants but substances from animals and human bodies, minerals, and manufactured objects. Some remedies depend on symbolism, resemblance, or supernatural ideas about illness. Some mineral materials contain mercury, arsenic, or other substances that can cause serious harm. A material “believed to treat” something in the past has not automatically been shown effective by modern research, and its preparation and dose are not automatically safe. Calling Bencao Gangmu a “modern medical encyclopedia” would actually hide what makes it valuable as a sixteenth-century work.

“Great” and “wrong in places” can both be true. The book is great because it preserved and reorganized an enormous body of knowledge, took names and corrections seriously, and left sources for later readers to check. It contains errors because every author works within the tools, ideas, and evidence of a time. The best way to carry Li's spirit forward is not to defend every old sentence. It is to keep asking, “Where is the evidence? Has better evidence appeared since?”

Li worked on the compendium for about twenty-seven years. He completed a first draft in 1578 and continued revising it. The scholar Wang Shizhen wrote a preface in 1590. Major catalogs give both 1593 and 1596 for the earliest Jinling edition printed by Hu Chenglong, perhaps reflecting different records of block cutting, printing, and edition dates. Li died in 1593. Bibliographic dates alone therefore cannot prove the full dramatic scene in which he arranges his manuscript on his deathbed and a printer appears exactly three years later. What we can say is that an early edition emerged around the end of his life, while broad circulation came mostly after his death.

The book did not then stand still. It was formally introduced in Japan around 1607, and local Japanese reprints began in 1637. Scholars added reading marks, illustrations, commentary, and observations about local specimens. In the nineteenth century, British pharmaceutical researchers were still selecting, translating, and checking Chinese drug knowledge from it. The first complete English translation of the entire work did not appear until 2003. In 2011, early Bencao Gangmu editions entered UNESCO's Memory of the World Register. Transmission did not mean accepting every claim. It meant reprinting, translating, comparing, cutting, expanding, and investigating again.

Today, the safest role for a reader is historical detective, not self-prescribing doctor. “Natural” does not mean safe. An herb may cause side effects, be dangerous at a particular dose, be mistaken for another species, or interact with medicine. If someone is ill or swallows an unknown substance, tell a trusted adult immediately and get help from a doctor, pharmacist, or local poison control service. Never test an old formula on yourself.