Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body

Li Shizhen's (1597) Bencao gangmu, the classic materia medica of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), included 35 human drugs, including organs, bodily fluids, and excreta. Crude drugs derived from the human body were commonplace in the early history of medicine. Some of these TCM human drug usages are familiar from alternative medicine, such as medicinal breast milk and urine therapy. Others are uncommon, such as the "mellified man", which was a foreign nostrum allegedly prepared from the mummy of a holy man who only ate honey during his last days and whose corpse had been immersed in honey for 100 years.

Li Shizhen's (1518-1593) magnum opus, the Bencao gangmu or "Compendium of Materia Medica" is still one of the traditional Chinese physician's standard reference books.

Chapter 52 Renbu 人部 "human section" is classified under the fourth category of animals (兽之四), and is the last chapter in the Bencao gangmu. Li's preface explains this internal ordering (tr. Unschuld 1986: 151), "At the beginning, I have placed the waters and fires, followed by the soils. ... They are followed by the worms, scaly animals and crustaceans, fowl and quadruped; and man concludes the list. From the low I have ascended to the noble."

The human-drug chapter contains 37 entries (zhǒng 種 "kind; type"). Unlike the first 35 that discuss human pharmaceuticals and drug prescriptions, the last two are only recorded "for doctors as a reference" (tr. Luo 2003: 4190). Number 36 "Human beings from different locations" discusses personal influences from astrology, environment, geography, and climate (perhaps historical climatology in modern terms). Number 37 "Human beings in extraordinary conditions and of odd forms" ranges across cosmology, male and female sterility, pregnancy, hermaphroditism, metamorphosis, evolution, and monsters.

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