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How did the folk prescription of Compendium of Materia Medica come from?

Recently, due to the need of writing a book, I leafed through Compendium of Materia Medica and found some interesting things. As the name implies, this masterpiece should mainly include herbs, but it is not. It divides drugs into water, fire,

Earth, stone, grass, grain, vegetables, fruits, wood, utensils, insects, scales, vectors, birds, beasts and people, a total of 16, covering almost everything in the world, no wonder some people call it an ancient encyclopedia.

However, Compendium of Materia Medica is different from other encyclopedias. It is a medical book that records everything in the world for the purpose of treating diseases. For example, the clothing department records crotch, undershirt, belt, headscarf, foot binding cloth, hemp fiber and grass.

Shoes, dead people's pillows, calendars, Zhong Kui statues, peach symbols, cattail fans, cattail mats, pot lids, steamer, bamboo baskets, brooms, tripwires, toilets, urinals and other daily necessities are not intended to introduce their daily uses, but to illustrate them.

What disease can you cure by burning them to ashes or soaking them in juice? Isn't it interesting today? Many prescriptions included in Compendium of Materia Medica are obviously so-called folk remedies, and Li Shizhen sometimes tries to give a theoretical explanation to prove its effectiveness. It is recorded in the Ministry of Water that rain in different seasons can treat different diseases. For example, Li Shizhen explained that it is a "miracle" for a husband and wife to have sex after drinking a cup of rain since spring, which is "the meaning of exploiting everything from their resources".

Compendium of Materia Medica records a variety of remedies for infertility, some of which are even more bizarre than this. For example, one is: stealing a lamp from a rich family and putting it under the bed during the Lantern Festival can make people pregnant. Why? There is no explanation, which also makes

It's puzzling. Although some folk remedies don't explain, they can guess the reason. According to Compendium of Materia Medica, fishbone can boil the fishnet into juice or burn it into ashes. It gives no theoretical basis.

Said I was coming because since the fishing net can catch fish, its juice and gray fishbone are not a problem. Li Shizhen obviously believed in this peculiar folk prescription, but he also admired its magic. He described someone who hanged himself and burned the rope to ashes. Water clothes can cure madness, and sighed: "Look at the rare things contained in this ancient book, all of which are useless."

These "rare things" used to treat diseases may be just because of someone's whimsy at first, or someone really tries to prove that they have "magical effects", so they become empirical. After all, long-term infertility is dispensable.

Those who happen to be pregnant may suddenly get better, and the fishbone stuck in the throat may also fall off after drinking water and eating ash. If only these remedies are used, they can be used as effective evidence. When the folk prescription is invalid

Of course, there are more, but people are naturally inclined to remember effective cases and marvel at them, but they are easy to forget invalid cases-so fortune tellers don't have to worry about unemployment. The curative effect of folk prescription will be compared.

Life is more ordinary and remarkable, because many diseases can not only heal themselves, but also heal themselves more easily under the influence of psychological hints. Therefore, the more obscure, rare, filthy and bitter the drugs used in folk remedies are, it is harmful to patients.

The stronger the psychological suggestion, the better the therapeutic effect. Therefore, rhinoceros horn, tiger bone, tiger penis and bear gall are still regarded as good medicine, and there are a lot of impurities used as medicine in Compendium of Materia Medica: cow's hoof water and Sanjiaxi water.

Bowl water, grinding water, pig trough water, drowning pit water, sole soil, bed bottom soil, corpse burning soil, tomb soil, earthworm mud, dog urine mud, cesspit bottom mud, eaves mud, beam ash, door mortar ash, widow's bedside ash and so on can all be used.

Treat various diseases. People believe that "good medicine tastes bitter and is good for illness", so they also believe that bitter medicine is good for illness. Similarly, people believe in "fighting poison with poison", so poison is also used as a good antidote.

Medicine. The ending of Compendium of Materia Medica is "Human Body Department". It is said that the human body is full of treasures: hair, scalp, earwax, knee scales, fingernails, teeth, human excrement, human urine, milk, menstrual fluid, human blood, semen, saliva, tooth scales, beard, pubic hair, human bones, skull, placenta, umbilical cord and so on. Of course, it's not that the ancients in China were particularly eccentric, and so were the ancient medical skills of other nationalities. It is problematic to treat rare, dirty and poisonous things as good medicine, and the reason should be the same. But "Compendium of Materia Medica" and "Encyclopedia" list all these together, which is very prominent.

No one will deny that Compendium of Materia Medica contains many valuable experiences of the ancients. Even Lu Xun thinks this book is "rich in treasures". But the experience that has not been scientifically tested may not be reliable, but it may only be so.

Pass it on. The ancients trusted their predecessors' experience so much, sometimes even to the point of absurdity, which greatly reduced the reference value of their experience. We can now dispense with the strange remedies mentioned above.

Deny it thoughtfully and discard it without checking, but what about the remedies that don't look so weird? For example, it is undoubtedly unwise to deny and give up the efficacy of herbs, but how much of it is speculation and misinformation, and how much?

It is a valuable treatment experience. It is a difficult mission to get rid of a lot of roughness and falsehood and get a little bit of possible essence and truth.

Source: China Youth Daily

(Editor: Xu Dan)