Materia Medica Arranged by Meridian

Bencao Fenjing (Materia Medica Arranged by Meridian) is a materia medica work by the Qing physician Yao Lan (courtesy name Wanyun, also known as Weimo Hesheng), a native of Shanyin (present-day Shaoxing, Zhejiang). It was first printed in the twentieth year of the Daoguang reign (1840). Yao Lan served for over thirty years as a legal secretary and Confucian instructor, was skilled in medicine, and excelled particularly in materia medica. The book takes drug attribution to meridians as its framework and individual drugs as its entries, dividing more than eight hundred medicinal substances into sixteen sections covering the twelve regular meridians, the life gate, the eight extraordinary vessels, miscellaneous items not assigned to meridians, and an appendix; under each meridian the drugs are further grouped into six categories—tonifying, harmonizing, attacking, dispersing, cold, and hot—with brief notes on each drug's nature, meridian attribution, and principal therapeutic effects. The book also includes illustrations of the internal organs, a verse on the acupoints of the fourteen meridians, and meridian-acupoint charts, while a "General Classified Overview" and an "Appendix on Drugs with Identical Names" at the end facilitate retrieval. This arrangement—organizing drugs by meridian and classifying their natures into six categories—is an important representative of the Qing shift in materia medica classification from classification by efficacy to classification by meridian attribution. This edition is one of the "Chinese Ancient Medical Classics Collation Series" of China Press of Traditional Chinese Medicine, based on the 1840 Yao family edition, collated against the 1865 and 1888 editions, with collation and annotation by Fan Lei; a collation note precedes the main text, making it suitable as a collated edition for studying the theory of meridian attribution and Qing materia medica.