Ming physician who spent nearly 30 years travelling, testing herbs and writing 本草纲目, a record of almost 1,900 medicinal substances that is still a basic book of traditional Chinese medicine.
Li Shizhen spent thirty years writing the Compendium of Materia Medica.
Tips
culture
The title's 本草 'roots and herbs' is the old word for materia medica, and 纲目 means 'main headings and details', literally a net's head rope and its meshes, as in the idiom 纲举目张 'lift the head rope and every mesh opens'.
