李时珍的故事--中英双语

李时珍是中国明代著名的科学家，他写了《本草纲目》(Compendium of Materia Medica)。他所处的年代比牛顿要早一个多世纪。

当时有许多关于草药的书籍。但李时珍对这些书都不满意，书中有许多错误。有的草药定错了名，有的描述有错误，有的根本没有提到，所以他决定自己写一本书。

他坐下来写书之前，先四处采集草药，并对它们进行研究。他常常爬上高山，采集稀有的草药，就这样，他取得了一千多种草药的第一手资料，其中许多是前所未闻的。他还深入到劳动人民中间去，从他们那里学了许多东西。有一次，他看见有几个赶车的人正在熬煮粉红色的花。其中一个人对他说：“我们一年四季都在赶路，都有腰酸腿疼的病。这种花叫做牵牛花，可以止痛。”李时珍立刻记了下来。

一五七八年他最后完成了他的巨著。那时他已是六十岁的老人了。这本书他用了二十七年写成，是当时中国医学方面最好的一本书。

Li Shi-zhen is a famous scientist of China’s Ming dynasty who wrote the book Compendium of Materia Medica. The time he lived in was a century earlier than that of Newton.

At that time there were many books about herbs. But Li Shi-zhen was not satisfied, because there were too many mistakes: some gave wrong names to the herbs, some gave the wrong descriptions, while others didn’t give any description at all. So he decided to write a book himself.

Before he started writing, he went to many places to collect the herbs and made researches on them. He always climbed high mountains to collect the rare herbs. In this way, he got the first-hand materials of more than one thousand kinds of herbs, many of which haven’t been heard of before. He also got close to farmers and learned many things from them. Once he saw several drivers boiling pink flowers. One of them told him, ”You see, we are on the way all year round, so we all have different sorts of aches in our body. The flower we are boiling is called morning glory and i t’s a perf ect pain-killer.”On hearing this, Li noted down his words immediately.

Li finally finished his great work in 1578. By that time he was already an old man. It took him 27 years to write this book, which turn out to be the best book in medical science field in China at that time.