Can a medical book serve the poor?

That time, that place

Joseon had just come through the Japanese invasions. The population had fallen and epidemics spread, with far too few physicians and too little medicine.

Chinese medical books were plentiful — but their prescriptions assumed Chinese materia medica. A prescription calling for what you cannot obtain is no prescription at all.

Why this question

Two problems. One was the medicine itself; the other was the book.

If a medical text opens from disease names in difficult classical Chinese, someone who is not a physician cannot use it at all — and the people in most need were those in districts with no physician.

What was found

The Donguibogam answered both.

First, it listed 649 medicinal materials found on Korean soil with their names written alongside in the Korean alphabet, so that anyone with even a little literacy could identify them locally.

Second, it changed the book's architecture: arranged to start from the body rather than from disease names — inner workings, outward signs, other illnesses, remedies, needles and moxa. A sick person does not know the name of their disease. They know only where and how it hurts. The book was built to be entered from there.