Běncǎo Hài Lì 本草害利
The Harms and Benefits of Materia Medica by 凌奐 (Líng Huàn, zì Xiǎowǔ 曉五, hào Zhégōng Lǎorén 折肱老人, 1822–1893, 清)
About the work
The Běncǎo hài lì is the most distinctive late-Qīng pharmacopoeia in its overall structural reversal: each substance entry leads with the harms (害) of the drug — its contraindications, the patient conditions in which it must not be given, the over-dosage syndromes, the formula-misuse failures — and only secondarily lists the benefits (利). The title encodes this priority: harms first, benefits second. Líng explains in his preface that the late-Qīng clinical landscape, marked by the great mid-century wēnbìng (epidemic-warmth) outbreaks and the disruption of normal medical training during the Tàipíng war, had produced a generation of physicians who knew what drugs could do but not what they should not do, and his book is intended to correct this.
The work in 4 juǎn organises substances by zàngfǔ affinity — entering the channel of the heart, the lung, the liver, etc. — rather than by natural-history class. This is a clinical organisation: a physician treating a heart-channel pathology can read off in sequence which drugs are appropriate, with the hài warnings prominent for each. Approximately 350 substances are covered. The orientation is heavily inflected by the Húzhōu wēnbìng school’s pharmacological caution — a marked contrast to the more confident “what does this drug do” approach of the earlier Wāng Áng 汪昂 tradition.
Prefaces
The local repository preserves the substance body. Standard editions preserve Líng’s own preface — undated but conventionally placed in the 1870s — explaining the hàilì programme.
Abstract
Líng Huàn (凌奐, 1822–1893, no confident CBDB id), zì Xiǎowǔ 曉五, hào Zhégōng Lǎorén 折肱老人. Native of Guī’ān 歸安 (Húzhōu, Zhèjiāng). He came from a medical family and was a second-generation pupil of the Húzhōu wēnbìng school; he was active in clinical practice through the great mid-19th-c. epidemics that devastated Jiāngnán and lost a daughter to one of them. The hào “Zhé gōng lǎorén” — “Old Man with the Broken Arm”, from the Zuǒzhuàn dictum that “thrice breaking one’s arm makes a good physician” — names his hard-won clinical experience.
The Hài lì’s significance is as the principal late-Qīng monograph on drug contraindications. It belongs alongside the late-Qīng critical pharmacology of Zhōu Yán 周巖 (KR3ec053) and Zōu Shù 鄒澍 (KR3ec066) but emphasises the negative limits of substance action rather than the positive doctrine. The work has been continuously available since printing and is a standard reference in modern Chinese-medicine adverse-reaction teaching. Líng also compiled a Língshì sì zhǒng 凌氏四種 medical collection in which the Hài lì is the principal volume.
Translations and research
- Bian, He. 2020. Know Your Remedies. PUP.
- Běncǎo hài lì jiào zhù 本草害利校注. 1996. Zhongyi guji.
- No Western-language translation.
Links
- Wikidata: not yet assigned.
- 本草害利 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB