Compendium of Materia Medica consists of 52 volumes with about 65438+900,000 words. There are 62 categories in 16, including 1892 kinds of drugs, 1 1096 prescriptions and 1092 attached drawings. There are only 88 1 species of botanical drugs in this book, 942 species in Appendix 6 1, and 153 species in famous and unused ones, totaling 1095 species, accounting for 58% of the total number of drugs. It covers all kinds of plants: lower algae, lichens and higher bryophytes, ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms. At the same time, many exotic plants were collected, which was a complete collection of plants at that time. In his book, Li Shizhen divided the plants into five categories, namely, grass, valley, vegetable, fruit and headquarters, with a total of 30 categories, and the grass was divided into nine categories: mountain grass, vanilla, wet grass, poisonous grass, creeping weed, water grass, stone grass, moss and weeds. Li Shizhen's plant classification method is unique in the world. Even earlier than the plant classification proposed by Linnaeus, the founder of western plant taxonomy 175 years, the content is much richer.