Once, Li Shizhen passed a mountain village and saw a large group of people in front of him. Looking closer, I saw a man drunk and dancing from time to time. As soon as I learned, it turned out that this man had drunk the medicated wine soaked in eggplant. "Mountain eggplant ..." Li Shizhen looked at the drunk who leaned over and laughed, and wrote down the name of the medicine. When he got home, he rummaged through medical books and found a record about this herb. However, medical books simply say that its real name is "Datura". Li Shizhen is determined to find it and study it further. Later, Li Shizhen discovered Datura when collecting medicinal materials. He made wine from Datura as the villagers said. A few days later, Li Shizhen decided to taste and experience the efficacy of Datura. He took a sip and it was delicious. Take another sip, and your tongue and even your whole mouth will be numb; One more sip and you'll feel groggy. After a while, they will feel groggy. In a short time, they will giggle and dance with their hands and feet. Finally, he lost consciousness and fell to the ground. The people on one side were frightened, so they quickly gave Li Shizhen detoxification medicine. After a long time, Li Shizhen woke up and everyone was relieved. Li Shizhen was so excited when he woke up that he quickly wrote down the origin, shape, habit and growth period of Datura stramonium, how to make wine, and the function, taking method, efficacy and reaction process of the medicine. Someone complained that he was too risky, but he smiled and said, "How do you know its efficacy if you don't taste it?" Besides, you can't do experiments on patients! "Everyone listened to his words, more admire Li Shizhen. In this way, another drug that can be used as clinical anesthesia came out.
Skilled drug testing
Li Shizhen pays special attention to practice. He is smart and knowledgeable, and often creates some strange methods to verify the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine. Once, Li Shizhen found a book saying that wild taro leaves can cure blood stasis. So he found two glasses of pig blood to do the experiment. The powder of wild taro leaves was put in the first cup of pig blood, and nothing was put in the other cup. After a period of time, the pig blood added with taro hemp leaf powder did not coagulate, but the pig blood as control soon coagulated, which initially confirmed the efficacy of taro hemp leaf in treating blood stasis. Li Shizhen thought deeply: The above experiment only proves that the leaves of wild taro can prevent blood coagulation, so for the blood clots that have already formed. What does it do? So he mixed the powder of taro leaves into the newly solidified blood clot, and the blood clot slowly melted into blood! This further proves that taro leaves also have the function of removing blood stasis. This pharmacological experiment is also of a certain level by today's standards. Li Shizhen has many stories about this. In order to test whether the traditional Chinese medicine Fengxianzi has the effect of "softening and hardening", he put dozens of Fengxianzi into the cooked fish soup and quickly picked up the fish. He found that the fish bones became brittle and rotten, which confirmed that Fengxianzi had the effect of softening and hardening. He also consciously washed greasy utensils with ginkgo puree, and found that it had the function of removing greasy, which proved that ginkgo can remove phlegm and turbidity when it enters the lungs.