Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) contains an extensive knowledge that the Chinese nation has accumulated through practical experimentation and theoretical research in treating diseases and promoting health over a period of thousands of years. Throughout the history, many TCM theorists, experts, and pharmacists have contributed valuable works. The most representative of them was Li Shizhen with his Ben Cao Gang Mu (Compendium of Materia Medica), which was praised by Charles Darwin as an 'encyclopaedia' of ancient China and was selected into Memory of the World Register by UNESCO in 2011.This book is divided into two parts: the introduction and the selected reading of the original work of Ben Cao Gang Mu. In the introductory part, the life story, academic characteristics and main contributions of Li Shizhen are illustrated, and suggested learning methods of the book are recommended. In the selected reading part, five aspects are mainly discussed: original preface and memorial to the throne, essence of Li Shizhen's medical theories, treatment of various diseases, Li Shizhen's medical records and medical notes, and health preservation. Apart from the selected reading from Ben Cao Gang Mu, theoretical exposition and modern application are supplemented in each chapter so as to improve readers' theoretical knowledge and ability of practical problem-solving.

Two Western doctors assembled this updated edition of a massive sixteenth-century document, annotating their translation with their own observations. A treasury of tried-and-true wisdom from centuries of practical experience, it has served as a basis for modern-day organic medicine and has enormous value for practitioners of alternative healing methods.

Volume IX in the Ben cao gang mu series offers a complete translation of chapters 47 through 52, devoted to fowls, domestic and wild animals, and human substances. The Ben cao gang mu is a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopedia of medical matter and natural history by Li Shizhen (1518–1593). The culmination of a sixteen-hundred-year history of Chinese medical and pharmaceutical literature, it is considered the most important and comprehensive book ever written in the history of Chinese medicine and remains an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners. This nine-volume series reveals an almost two-millennia-long panorama of wide-ranging observations and sophisticated interpretations, ingenious manipulations, and practical applications of natural substances for the benefit of human health. Paul Unschuld's annotated translation of the Ben cao gang mu, presented here with the original Chinese text, opens a rare window into viewing the people and culture of China's past.

"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 evaluated the wisdom of two millennia about plants, animals, minerals, and artificial substances used in medicine and collected it with countless verbatim quotations and his own supplementary comments. A Catalog of Benevolent Items provides the first single-volume introduction to this vast record of the classical Chinese world. Edited and translated by Paul U. Unschuld, a leading expert on historical Chinese medical texts, 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. Thoughtfully curated and organized by theme, A Catalog of Benevolent Items provides an accessible gateway to this foundational work"--

The essays collected in Fate and Prognostication in the Chinese Literary Imagination deal with the philosophical, psychological, gender and cultural issues in the Chinese conception of fate as represented in literary texts and films, with a focus placed on human efforts to solve the riddles of fate prediction. Viewed in this light, the collected essays unfold a meandering landscape of the popular imaginary in Chinese beliefs and customs. The chapters in this book represent concerted efforts in research originated from a project conducted at the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Contributors are Michael Lackner, Kwok-kan Tam, Monika Gaenssbauer, Terry Siu-han Yip, Xie Qun, Roland Altenburger, Jessica Tsui-yan Li, Kaby Wing-Sze Kung, Nicoletta Pesaro, Yan Xu-Lackner, and Anna Wing Bo Tso.

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief. Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

Compiled 2,000 years ago, The Medical Classic of the Yellow Emperor is the oldest extant classic of the field and serves as the theoretical basis of traditional Chinese medicine.