Heo Jun, the Royal Physician

A sheet of paper has faded to a pale yellow. It is so thin that, held up to the light, it shows the ink strokes of the page behind it.

On that page, characters run in vertical columns from top to bottom, packed close together and perfectly even. They are Chinese characters. The script is beautiful, and it is hard. To read a page like this with ease, a person needed many years of study. They needed a teacher, books, and long hours of sitting still instead of working in the fields.

Up close, right beside the name of a medicinal plant, sits another small cluster of signs. Smaller. Neater. Just a few straight strokes and a few circles, as simple as a child's drawing.

It is the everyday name of that same plant, written in a script that a person could learn to read in a few days.

The whole story lies in the gap between those two names, side by side on the same sheet of paper.

The page belongs to a book called the Donguibogam. Translated closely, the name means the precious mirror of Eastern medicine. The work runs to 25 volumes, divided into five main parts. Together they hold almost everything about health and plants that the country had gathered over many generations.

The man behind it was Heo Jun.

He was a royal physician of the Joseon court, which means he was the king's own doctor. Joseon was the dynasty that ruled Korea for about five centuries from 1392. He worked at the Naeuiwon, the royal medical office, which looked after medicines right inside the palace walls. It was the highest place a medical man of that time could reach.

Then comes the most remarkable part.

When he sat down to write the greatest book of his life, the man inside the palace thought of the people outside the city gates.

He set himself a rule that sounds small but took enormous work. For the familiar medicinal plants, next to the formal name in Chinese characters, he also wrote the name that village people used every day, in that simple script. Of the 1,403 medicinal ingredients in the book, 637 were written down this way.

Read aloud, the number sounds dry. But count it out as work. It meant stopping the brush 637 times to find out what the people of some region called a plant. Then, beside the formal line, he added a line in a script that the learned men of the day still regarded as the writing of common folk.

That simple script was Hangul. King Sejong had it presented to the court about 150 years earlier. It was made for exactly one purpose: so that ordinary people could also write down what they wanted to say. In Heo Jun's book, Chinese characters and Hangul stand side by side on a single page. At the time, only the upper classes could read Chinese characters, but anyone could learn the new script.

There is one more detail, and it shows most clearly whom he was thinking of.

The plants he placed in the parts of the book easiest to use were not rare. They grew on hills, in fields and along footpaths, things any household could find without spending much money. A person in a faraway village, days from the nearest doctor, could at least know the right name of the plant growing by the family hedge. It is like passing a clump of roadside grass and suddenly knowing what it is called, after years of seeing it without a name.

The book was not finished in a year or two.

The work began in 1596, when King Seonjo assigned the physicians of the Naeuiwon to sit down together and compile a book of medicine for the people. But before long there was war beyond the walls, the physicians were scattered in every direction, and the work had to stop. When the war was over, King Seonjo gave the task to Heo Jun to carry on. From then on the work continued for many more years, even though the throne passed to another king along the way, and the whole country had countless other troubles.

King Seonjo did not live to see his book finished.

Heo Jun kept working. Year after year he read, compared and rearranged from the start, never leaving his stack of paper behind. In 1610 the manuscript was complete. Three years later, in 1613, the book was finally printed. From the first stroke of the brush to the first printed copy took 17 years. Most of that time he spent alone with paper and ink.

In 2009, UNESCO added the Donguibogam to the Memory of the World register, a list kept for documents that humanity wants to save for later generations. It was the first medical book ever named on that list.

On reflection, what UNESCO honored was not any single remedy. It was a way of thinking. Precious knowledge has to reach the hands of the people who need it. If it stays locked in a script that most people cannot read, its worth comes to nothing.

Seoul today still keeps a place for him. In the Gayang neighborhood of Gangseo District, the area people consider his birthplace, stands a museum named after Heo Jun. It displays the tools of Eastern medicine, medical books, and objects that once belonged to him. It also shows a specimen of the script used in the book itself. Some of the books on display were copied out by his own hand. His life was later made into a Korean television drama.

But if only one image of this man could be kept, it should be the page from the beginning.

Tall, solemn Chinese characters run down in columns. Right beside them, small and rounded, is the name people used for that plant out in the fields. The two scripts sit close together, and neither crowds the other.

More than 400 years ago, somewhere beside a hedge, someone bent down to look at a wild plant. For the first time in their life, they read its right name aloud. The man who wrote that page sat far away in the palace, and he surely never knew that person's face.

He wrote the name in anyway. For a person he did not know.