本草文献是中医药学研究的重要组成部分。本书作者王家葵老师在此领域深耕多年，以深入的研究及丰富的教学经验为基础，汇成这本《本草文献十八讲》。本书从东汉《神农本草经》谈起，一直到清代的《植物名实图考》，共以十八部具有代表性的本草著作为线索，全面系统介绍本草文化。对读者而言，既是一本很好的本草文化的入门书，也可以借此深入理解中医文化。

Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China’s early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy—as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine—resists easy characterization. While China’s long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rejecting narratives of intellectual stagnation or an unchanging folk culture, He Bian argues that pharmacy’s history in early modern China can best be understood as a dynamic interplay between elite and popular culture.
Beginning with decentralizing trends in book culture and fiscal policy in the sixteenth century, Bian reveals pharmacy’s central role in late Ming public discourse. Fueled by factional politics in the early 1600s, amateur investigation into pharmacology reached peak popularity among the literati on the eve of the Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. The eighteenth century witnessed a systematic reclassification of knowledge, as the Qing court turned away from pharmacopeia in favor of a demedicalized natural history. Throughout this time, growth in long-distance trade enabled the rise of urban pharmacy shops, generating new knowledge about the natural world.