on the stone coffin and it was buried in the ground. after 100 years, the body became a kind of honey-preserved thing that was used as a drug. when someone was suffering from an injury to his body, including bone fractures, a little of the "honey man" could be taken as a drug. it worked right away. even in that country, this was something very precious. it was called "honey man. the above is quoted from tao jiucheng's book. it is not known whether this is true or not. so it is recorded at the end of this section for further study. read says burmese priests have the custom of preserving their chief abbots in coffins full of honey. among this total content of 35 entries with 287 prescriptions, 13 human drugs with 217 prescriptions first appeared in the bencao gangmu while 22 types with 67 prescriptions came from earlier chinese materia medica: 1 from the eastern han dynasty (25-220) shennong bencaojing; 5 from the liang dynasty (502-557) mingyi bielu; 9 from the tang dynasty (618-907) xinxiu bencao and bencao shiyi; 8 from song dynasty (960-1279) texts da ming rihua bencao, kaibao bencao, jiayou bencao, and zhenglei bencao; and 1 other from the ming dynasty (1368-1644) bencao mengquan. a few bencao gangmu prescriptions are cited from non-medical literature, such as zhang hua's (c. 290) bowuzhi "record of wide knowledge" collection of wonders (but this magical marital formula is not found in the current reconstituted version). prescription 52.16.5, "to keep one's wife from being jealous. wrap a toad in the cloth the wife uses to absorb her menses 婦人月水布 and bury it five (15 cm) deep, one (31 cm) in front of the privy." since more than one-third of the human drugs were first added in li shizhen's time, suggested that "research into the origin of these relatively recent remedies which may reveal a new interchange of thought and practice between china and other civilizations. it may have been that the arabs were in this matter a common source of both chinese and european medicine." sample entry bencao gangmu drug entries typically give the name used in the earliest materia medica reference, synonyms, explanations from earlier authors, information about preparing the drug, indications, effects, and prescriptions. as an example of these human drug entries, compare read's partial summary and luo's full translation of 52.26. 433. 陰毛 yin mao. pubic hair (m & f). shih-yi: pubic hair of the male is used for snake bite. twelve hairs held in the mouth and sucked will keep the poison from entering the viscera. for difficult labour, 14 hairs from the husband ashed and taken with lard in the form of a pill. pubic hair from the female is used to treat gonorrhea and sexual diseases. also for swollen belly in the cow. this "shih-yi" abbreviates chen cangqi's (c. 720) bencao shiyi 本草拾遺 "supplement to materia medica". read translates yinyangyibing 陰陽易病 (lit. "yin-yang exchange disorders") as "gonorrhea and sexual diseases", compare luo's "febrile disease transmitted by sex" below. according to cooper & sivin, yinyangyi is a general name for "illnesses contracted through sexual intercourse with someone who has just recovered from them", which are diagnosed by the appearance of a yang pulse on the wrist under conditions in which a yin pulse is normally read, and vice versa. clause 52-26 yinmao human pubic hair – bencao shiyi (supplement to materia medica by chen cangqi). chen cangqi: male pubic hair is a good antidote for snake bite. hold 20 strands of pubic hair in the mouth, and swallow the juice. this will prevent the snake's toxin from entering the abdomen. human pubic hair is good for treating dystocia with transverse or footling presentation. burn 14 pieces of pubic hair of the patient's husband, blend the residue with pig lard, and make into pills the size of soy beans. swallow the pills. – qiaijin yaofang (essential prescriptions worth a thousand gold). li shizhen: female pubic hair is good for treating stranguria of five types and the yinyangyi syndrome (febrile disease transmitted by sex). two prescriptions collected recently. prescription 52.26.1: to treat the yinyangyi syndrome (febrile disease transmitted by sex): after a man has just recovered from a serious disease, and he has sex too soon, his scrotum will become swollen and will shrink into his abdomen. this will be accompanied by severe colic. burn female pubic hair into ash and take it by mouth right away. also drink water in which female genitalia have been washed. – puji fang (prescriptions for universal relief). prescription 52.26.2: to treat an ox that is dying from the effects of a distended abdomen: wrap female pubic hair in straw and feed it to the ox. this will work. – waitai miyao (medical secrets of an official). luo explains translating "clause" instead of "drug" in chapter 52: "as most of the "drugs" from human being are no more used medically, it seems rude to list them as drugs." note the medical terms dystocia "a slow or difficult labor or delivery" and stranguria (i.e., strangury "a painful, frequent need to urinate, when the bladder is largely empty or with little urine production"). moral aspects reflecting the well-known confucianist inhibition against mutilating one's body, li shizhen's preface to chapter 52 ethically condemns the use of some human drugs. the human is a different species from all the other organisms used as sources of drugs. in later times, taoist alchemists considered that many parts of the human body should be used as drugs, such as bone, flesh, and gall. this is really very rude and inhuman. in the present category, all parts of the human body that have been used as drugs are recorded. the use of drugs from the human body that is not contrary to morality is recorded in detail. those drugs that are cruel or foul are not recorded in detail. but all of them are listed in this category. li does not give prescriptions for 12 of the 35 human drugs, which he considered "cruel or foul". li shizhen sharply criticized medicinal usage of bone and flesh. in ancient times, people thought it a benevolent deed to bury discarded human bones. such people thought that they would be rewarded with good. but some alchemists collect human bones and use them as a drug with the hope of making a profit from them. should this be done to those who save people from diseases? even dogs do not eat the bones of dogs. why should a human eat the bones of other humans? (52.27) under the 52.34 human flesh entry, li denounces two earlier pharmacopeias. chen cangqi's (early 8th century) bencao shiyi prescribes flesh as a good drug for láozhài 癆瘵 "consumptive and infectious diseases", and li shizhen says, "our bodies, skin, and hair are inherited from our parents and should be well protected. even when parents are seriously ill, how can they bear to eat the flesh of their offspring? this is a practice followed only by stupid, foolish folk." li shizhen quotes tao jiucheng's (8th century) chuogeng lu, "in ancient and present-day warfare, soldiers have eaten human flesh, calling it xiangrou (meaning "imagine it as meat") or liangjiaoyang (meaning meat of sheep with two legs")", and comments, "this is done by bandits and thieves without human hearts. such damned villains!" for such a renowned physician and herbalist, li shizhen was sometimes credulous. the "penis" entry (52.32) gives the common term yīnjīng 陰莖 "yin stalk" and says, li shizhen: a man's penis is not a drug. the book chuogeng lu by tao jiucheng: mr. shen in hangzhou was once caught in the act of raping a woman. he cut off part of his penis as a self-punishment. but the wound bled incessantly and did not heal for a month thereafter. someone told him to find the amputated part of his penis. he found it, pounded it into powder, and took the powder by mouth with wine. after a few days, the wound healed. this might be a useful reference to those whose genitals are physically damaged. so it is recorded here for reference. luo's "those whose genitals are physically damaged" euphemistically translates the original metaphor cánshì 蠶室 "silkworm nursery; (traditional) prison where the punishment of castration was inflicted". compare cooper & sivin's version, "contemplating this story, it would seem that those 'who go down to the silkworm room' should not be ignorant of this method, so i append it here." in some bencao gangmu contexts concerning human drugs, li shizhen would accept the traditional theory but deny the contemporary practice. under the human breath or qi section (52.23), li says a "very effective" method for treating an elderly person who is suffering from cold and deficiency in the lower body is to have a boy or girl blow air through a cloth into the navel. however, he notes that contemporary "taoist alchemists have advocated the following way of using this energy. let a maiden breathe air into the nostrils, umbilicus, and penis of an old man. this will provide a connection between the three dantians (the elixir fields at the upper, middle and lower regions of the body)." li shizhen moralistically warns, "this is a small skill practiced by alchemists. if this is not done exactly as stipulated, such practice can only bring harm to the person." scientific analysis lu gwei-djen and joseph needham, historians of science and technology in china, analyzed urinary steroid hormones in the first serious scientific study of chinese human drugs. they researched early references to the concentrated sex hormone preparations (52.11) nibaiyin 溺白垽 "white urinary sediment" and (52.12) qiushi 秋石 "processed urinary sediment", which li shizhen says were respectively first recorded in the (659) xinxiu bencao and in the (1567) bencao mengchuan materia medica. the chinese use of urine as a medicine, especially for impotence and other sexual disorders, has a long history. the book of the later han described three daoist fangshi "adepts; magicians" who lived in the late 2nd century; gan shi 甘始, dongguo yannian 東郭延年, and feng junda 封君達 "were all expert at following the techniques of in commerce with women. they could also drink urine and sometimes used to hang upside down. they were careful and sparing of their seminal essence and (inherited) , and they did not boast with great words of their powers." based upon the bencao gangmu list of six methods processing urine to produce qiushi, lu & needham conclude that from the 11th century onwards, chinese alchemists, physicians, and iatro-chemists were successfully making quasi-empirical preparations of active substances with androgens and estrogens, a technique that modern biochemists did not develop until the early 20th century. the physician william c. cooper and the sinologist nathan sivin chose what the chinese call rényào 人藥 "human drugs" as a pilot experiment sample for pharmacologically analyzing the efficacy of drugs used in tcm. in contrast to many traditional chinese plant, animal, and mineral pharmaceuticals with uncertain active constituents, the chemical composition of the human body and parts is well known, and "their therapeutic effectiveness, or lack of it, can be objectively, if approximately, estimated without reference to their chinese context.". they selected 8 widely used human drugs from the 37 listed in bencao gangmu chapter 52: human hair, nails, teeth, milk, blood, semen, saliva, and bone. for each substance, cooper and sivin first analyzed the bencao gangmu information about drug preparation and use, and then commented on the known chemical composition of the human drug and other ingredients in the prescriptions. cooper & sivin applied the criteria of clinical pharmacology to analyze the possible medicinal value of the bencao gangmu pharmacopeia's human drug prescriptions for 66 diseases, 58 (88%) of which prescribe one or more ancillary ingredients. fifty (76%) diseases treated would not have been relieved strictly by known properties of the prescription constituents or their combinations, and the other sixteen (24%) diseases might possibly be benefited from the human drug, another ingredient, or their synergistic combination. these 24% conceivably beneficial human drug prescriptions can be divided into positive and possible types. first, positive specific benefits for the ailments could come from effects of three (5%) human drug prescriptions alone (all for human blood, e.g., 52.17.3 drink blood mixed with water for internal hemorrhage from wounds, two (3%) ancillary ingredients