Materia Medica — the 2 books the tradition kept on this shelf
Substance catalogues: hundreds of entries of what this is called, where it grows, how it is graded, and what it is traditionally said to do. Every later materia medica, and every formula in this corpus, is assembled out of entries like these.
Every entry below is taken from the same catalogue the product is built on: the title, the hand behind it, when it sits in time, what the book works on, and what it changed. Sentences in bold are the ones we can point an outside source at; the rest is our summary of the book, not a claim from it.
Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica (神农本草经)
汉 托名神农 · Han (2nd c.) · Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing
Works on: One substance per entry, and a deliberately narrow field list: flavour, temperature, whether it is poisonous, what it treats, what long-term use does, its other names, where it grows. The received sentences carry no compound prescriptions. Substances are grouped in three grades — 120 emperors for nourishing life, 120 ministers for cultivating nature, 125 envoys for breaking up accumulation — 365 in all.
What it changed: It fixed two things for every materia medica after it: a set of fields — flavour, nature, toxicity, indications, aliases, provenance — and one axis of three grades, for sustaining life, cultivating nature, treating disease. It also keeps a layer of textual criticism, separating the classic's own lines, the alternative sayings of Wu Pu and later physicians, and the editor's notes, and judging a commandery name wrong when it postdates the book. Every pharmacopoeia since, from Korea to the earliest Japanese lists, added onto that frame.
Compendium of Materia Medica (本草纲目)
明·李时珍 · Ming (1596) · Ben Cao Gang Mu
Works on: One drug per entry, with fixed fields: standard name, alternate names, description and provenance, doubts and corrections, flavour and nature, indications, attached formulas. Before any drug it lays out the earlier materia medica it is revising, and the medical and secular books it cites. The job it sets itself: recheck, line by line, what the previous editions got wrong, left out or left vague.
What it changed: Its lasting usefulness is structural: drug knowledge as entries with fixed fields, so you can look up by name or by field instead of reading the whole book straight through. "Gang mu" names that structure — the standard title as warp, everything beneath as weft. The original preface states its own scale and method: 1,518 drugs inherited, 374 added, sixteen divisions, fifty-two scrolls; duplicates cut, gaps filled, errors corrected. In 2011 it entered the Memory of the World Register alongside the Inner Canon — a first for Chinese medical texts, reported at the time in the Chinese-language medicine press.
Where this leaves our product
Qicura reads a described symptom against this kind of material and returns a pattern in plain language with the sources named. It does not dispense: no herb quantities, no formula composition, no preparation instructions, and no needling technique - those are deliberate limits enforced on the server, not wording we soften for a page.
Educational, self-care content - not a medical diagnosis. For personal advice, consult a qualified practitioner.