This study aims to predict potential targets and molecular mechanisms of Yimucao in the treatment of postpartum abdominal pain based on network pharmacology.At first,the active components of Yimucao were screened by TCMSP platform and literature mining,and then the potential targets of active components of Yimucao were screened by TCMSP platform,Swiss Target Prediction platform,Similarity ensemble approach;relevant targets of postpartum abdominal pain were obtained by OMIM database,GeneCards database.Finally,the overlap targets between the disease and drug were obtained.Then a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network and further network topology were constructed to retrieve the key targets of the interaction relationship between Yimucao and postpartum abdominal pain.Finally,the perform gene ontology (GO) analysis and Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis were applied to identify the involved mechanisms.Immunohistochemical experiments were carried out to verify the outcomes.Finally,10 kinds of active components,and 144 kinds of intersecting targets with postpartum abdominal pain were screened.Then 98 targets were retrieved by topological analysis,and further analyzed using GO and KEGG enrichment analysis.GO analysis yielded 1 151 entries for biological processes (BP),97 entries for cell composition (CC) and 122 entries for molecular function (MF);KEGG enrichment analysis identified 41 pathways,which mainly involved estrogen signaling pathway and PI3K-Akt signaling pathway and MAPK signaling pathway and HIF-1 signaling pathway.The results of immunohistochemical experiments showed that Yimucao could significantly inhibit the up-regulation of PGF2αR and MMP9 proteins and down-regulation of TIMP1 and VEGFR2 proteins in the uterine tissue on abortion rat model.Through network pharmacology and immunohistochemical experiments,we found that the therapeutical effect of Yimucao against postpartum abdominal pain is an intricate result of multi-components,multi-targets and multi-channel,which provides a theoretical basis for the clinical application of Yimucao.