Zhèngzhì Běncǎo 證治本草
Materia Medica for Diagnosis and Treatment by 陸之柷 (Lù Zhīzhù, fl. Míng, dates unknown)
About the work
The Zhèngzhì běncǎo is a Míng-dynasty pharmacopoeia organised by clinical presentation (證, pattern; 治, treatment) rather than by substance category. The catalog assigns it to Lù Zhīzhù 陸之柷 and dates it 明. The work belongs to the genre of zhèngzhì (diagnosis-treatment) pharmacology that flourished in the late Míng — texts that re-arrange the substance-based corpus of the Zhènglèi/Gāngmù tradition by disease category, making them more accessible for bedside use.
The 漢學文典 transmitted text in the local repository is essentially empty: only a single file (KR3ec022_001.txt) with the mandoku header and no body content. The work is little studied; no major modern edition exists. It is referenced obliquely in the bibliographic catalogue of 《明史·藝文志》 medical works but few details survive.
Prefaces
No surviving preface or body content in the local repository.
Abstract
Lù Zhīzhù (陸之柷) is a minor Míng-dynasty figure with no securely datable biographical record. CBDB has no clear entry under this name. The conventional dating in frontmatter (1368–1644) reflects the breadth of the Míng dynasty; the work cannot be more precisely placed without further evidence. The text appears in some Qīng pharmacological bibliographies but is not a major source for the Gāngmù tradition; Lǐ Shízhēn does not cite it.
The work’s significance is principally bibliographic — as a witness to the late-Míng genre of disease-organised pharmacopoeia that paralleled the more common substance-organised structure. The local copy being effectively empty, however, the entry here relies on external bibliographic evidence rather than direct textual reading.
Translations and research
- No substantial secondary literature located.
Links
- Wikidata: not yet assigned.
- 證治本草 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB