Mellified man

Relying on a second-hand account, the text reports a story that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection.

[citation needed] Bencao Gangmu calls the concoction miren (蜜人), translated as "honey person" or "mellified man".

After a hundred years, the seals are removed and the confection so formed used for the treatment of wounds and fractures of the body and limbs—only a small amount taken internally is needed for the cure.

[6]According to Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, this content was Arabic, but Li Shizhen confused the story with a Burmese custom of preserving the bodies of abbots and high monks in honey, so that "the Western notion of a drug made from perdurable human flesh was combined with the characteristic Buddhist motif of self-sacrifice for others".

[7] In her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, writer Mary Roach observes that the text points out that it does not know the veracity of the mellified man story.