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.
