李时珍老年病学术思想的传承与创新

李时珍是我国古代著名的中医药学家，其编撰的《本草纲目》是中华文明的一张亮丽名片，也是中医药传承创新的源头活水。2011年，《本草纲目》与《黄帝内经》一同入选联合国教科文组织《世界记忆名录》。

李时珍在长期行医问诊的基础上，不断探索，守正创新，最终形成了独特的老年病学术思想。他认为衰老形成的主要机理在于虚损、瘀血内阻、痰浊阻滞等，临床中应重视脾胃阳气升发作用，以及补益肝肾、固护肺气、补心养阴、消痰化瘀等对延缓衰老的重要作用，并十分推崇“肾为先天之本”“脾乃元气之母”的学术观点。《本草纲目》中蕴含着丰富的老年病防治思想，所涉老年病证多达211种，收载益智安神方147种，轻身延年类药物253种。李时珍的老年病学术思想为后世临床应用提供了理论支撑，至今仍具有重要的医学价值和社会意义。

湖北作为李时珍的故里，担负着不断传承创新李时珍老年病学术思想的使命。2023年8月27日，湖北时珍实验室正式揭牌，为第10个湖北实验室，由湖北中医药大学牵头组建和运营管理，依托武汉市人民政府建设，聘任中国工程院院士、国医大师、北京中医药大学教授王琦担任实验室主任。

实验室聚焦人口老龄化和老年健康，设立了李时珍老年病学术思想与养生文化系列研究、老年人群体质与治未病健康管理研究、老年慢病发病规律与干预机制研究、老年大健康产品开发、老年健康特色的道地药材可持续发展研究等五个研究方向。实验室以国家和湖北省重大需求为导向，以服务中医药强省建设为目标，整合湖北省内外优势力量，创新体制机制，以科技创新突破发展瓶颈，引领驱动湖北全省中医药的整体发展，致力于建成“创新、团队、资本、产业”四位一体的协同创新平台。

新时代需要李时珍老年病学术思想的创造性转化和创新性发展。未来，时珍实验室将立足湖北省中医药资源和李时珍中医药文化优势，重点围绕老年健康重大基础性问题，融合现代科学技术，揭示老年病发病规律，制定老年病防治方案指南，形成专家共识，研发老年健康产品和技术，奋力绘就老年健康学术的“全景图”。（供稿：湖北时珍实验室）

Li Shizhen and His Bencao Gangmu

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 Bencao gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica), which was praised by Charles Darwin as an "encyclopedia" of ancient China and was selected into Memory of the World Register by UNESCO in 2011.

Li Shizhen is virtually a household name in China. A kind of patron saint of Chinese herbal medicine, widely lauded by historians and practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, he is widely represented in popular and scholarly media. Movie star Jet Li recently named him one of his personal heroes, and he has been the focus of comic books, popular songs, TV dramas, and films. This is all rather impressive for a sixteenth-century doctor who lived, worked, and died in south China in relative obscurity.

Li was born in an area now known as Qichun, Hubei Province. His father had big plans for the boy, but young Shizhen was sickly and for various reasons kept failing the civil examinations that would have brought him (and his family) a prestigious post in the state bureaucracy. Luckily, he had a backup: his grandfather had been a traveling doctor, his father was a doctor, and that appeared to be his career path as well. He studied the medical classics, apprenticed with his father, treated local townsfolk, and eventually became successful enough to secure some brief yet high-profile positions in the capital and to befriend a few influential scholars. He wrote several short medical treatises on everything from mugwort to pulse diagnosis, composed some poetry, and made a decent living for himself, his wife, and his sons.

But this is not what put Li's face on the walls of medical colleges or his name in the speeches of Mao Zedong. None of it would have mattered had he not spent the last half of his life researching and writing an enormous book that became his magnum opus, the Bencao gangmu—an encyclopedic work in the tradition of bencao (materia medica) literature, which includes works explaining the qualities of the various substances used in making medical drugs: plants, animals, stones, clothing, household implements, and assorted other materials. One of the most ancient forms of medical writing in China, a bencao was often composed or revised at the behest (and with the financial backing) of an emperor. Instead, Li took it upon himself to spend decades traveling—interviewing hunters and fishermen and local healers—reading omnivorously, and trying various treatments for his own patients until he had compiled enough information to satisfy himself that it was time to sit down and compose an encyclopedia of his own. He spent 10 years writing his enormous book, and perished before it was published. Only due to the hard work, editing, and perseverance of his sons and grandsons was the Bencao gangmu finally printed in 1596, three years after his death.

But what an amazing book it was! The largest and most complete work on materia medica of its time, the Bencao gangmu contains 52 chapters of descriptions, stories, poems, histories, and recipes for how to use and understand everything from fire and mud to ginseng and artemisia, turtles and lions, and even human body parts as medical drugs. Li was a man obsessed: convinced that the only way to properly use something as a drug was to understand as much as possible about it, he stuffed everything he could find into his bencao, from as many different books as he could get his hands on. He experimented both on the creatures around him and on himself, recording his experience getting "half-drunk" in local bars and trying out remedies on patients to test the hypotheses of other doctors, poets, and scholars. In the pages of his book, one can find prescriptions for dragon bone, stories of corpse-eating demons and fire-pooping dogs, instructions for using magic mirrors, advice for getting rid of locusts, and recipes for excellent fish dinners.

Of course, we don't hear much about the dragons and demons anymore. As with most historical icons, Li's name and story have been resurrected many times since his death to serve many different purposes. In posters and films, he was recast in the image of a wandering people's doctor in the 1950s. As a result, most people today know of him as the father of Chinese pharmacy, a humble doctor who recorded the herbal knowledge of the people around him and preserved it for posterity. His image consecrates the walls of many TCM colleges in China, and scientists continue to test his recipes and translate his sixteenth-century pharmaceutical insights into the drugs and terminology of modern biomedicine. Modern authors often attempt to confirm Li's early medical use of plant, animal, and human-based medicines (from toads to ephedra), his clinical practices, and his prescriptions for drugs to treat epilepsy, gynecological diseases, and many other maladies.

There wasn't one correct remedy for an illness, as far as Li was concerned, and he recorded his thoughts of ghosts, phoenixes, and miraculous transformations in the same pages as his recipes for ginseng and chamomile. As he reminded aspiring doctors, there are often no clear answers when attempting to understand nature. We can only keep trying, learn from our mistakes and observations, and be open to phenomena and stories we might initially consider strange or impossible. He ended his book with a statement to that effect, and to the end of his life he struggled to make the statement known.