Wèijì bǎoshū 衞濟寶書
The Treasured Book on Defending Life by 東軒居士 (“Master of the Eastern Pavilion”, pseudonymous, 南宋, fl. before 1170)
About the work
A Southern-Sòng specialist treatise on furuncular abscesses (癰疽 yōngjū, suppurative pyogenic infections), in 2 juan with 22 piān of disease-discussion plus illustrated diagrams of the lesions. The work is presented in dialogic question-and-answer form, with the author claiming reception from “the High Master of Mt. Bùlǎo” 不老山高先生 — a Daoist-medical conceit the SKQS editors dismiss as fabulous. The work covers etiology, diagnosis, prognostic indicators, surgical-and-pharmacological treatment, materia-medica preparation, and acupuncture-and-moxibustion technique, and includes (per the SKQS editors’ note) details rarely seen in earlier surgical literature. Lost in independent transmission, recovered from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn. Through the Wèijì bǎoshū, the Sòng surgical tradition of furuncular medicine is the immediate ancestor of the YuánMíngQīng wàikē (external-medicine) literature.
Tiyao
Wèijì bǎoshū, 2 juan. The old base text was attributed to “Dōngxuān jūshì” without a personal name. Chén Zhènsūn’s Shūlù jiětí and the Sòng shǐ yìwén zhì both list the title as 1 juan; the work has long been without independent transmission, only the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn preserves its text and an original preface, which says: “My family holds 22 篇 of furuncular-abscess discussions, complete with illustrations, transmissible without limit; I therefore record it as the Family-Transmitted Wèijì bǎoshū.” The preface details the source-transmission of the discussions and prescriptions, and again says: “Each character of the textual annotation, every phrase and word, is given without idle assertion.” So this book was originally compiled from older tested-effective prescriptions; only the inserted notes are Dōngxuān jūshì’s own.
There is a separate preface by Dǒng Lián 董璉, recording how he obtained the manuscript from his wife’s Wāng 汪 family; the date Qiándào (1165–1173) appears in the preface — so Dōngxuān jūshì must have been a man before Sòng Xiàozōng’s reign, but his name is not recoverable. Xú Wénlǐ 徐文禮’s later collation-and-printing involved no more than collation; his postface claims to have “gathered the methods of various authorities into a single book” — but this is the standard commercial-publishing self-promotion of the Sòng book trade and not credible.
The discussion-of-treatment items are all set in dialogic form. The original preface attributes them to “the High Master of Mt. Bùlǎo” — a fabulous tale not verifiable. But the analysis is precise and penetrating, deeply grasping the subtleties; one without genuine reception of training could not compose this. After the discussion, the prescriptions are listed with diagrams; the section on materia-medica preparation and acupuncture-moxibustion handling is detailed and exhaustive, with much that later medical writers had not seen.
We have respectfully gathered and ordered the old text and divided it into upper and lower juan; the Rǔ yōng 乳癰 (mastitis) and Ruǎn jié 軟癤 (soft furuncle) two gates are appended at the end of the volume so that each item is in its appropriate place.
(Respectfully verified, 9th month of Qiánlóng 46 [1781]. Chief Compilers Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì; Chief Collator Lù Fèichí.)
Abstract
Composition window: 1100–1170. The lower bound is set by the late-Northern-Sòng date (the work shows no Northern-Sòng-court influence and circulates only in private-manuscript form); the upper bound is set by the Dǒng Lián Qiándào (1165–1173) preface preserved with the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn recovery, which dates the manuscript’s family-transmission to before Xiàozōng’s reign.
The work’s significance: (a) the principal pre-Yuán Chinese surgical-medical treatise on furuncular abscesses: the Wèijì bǎoshū is the earliest surviving comprehensive Chinese surgical work specifically on suppurative pyogenic conditions, predating the Yuán Wèi Yìlín 危亦林’s Shìyī déxiào fāng 世醫得效方 (1345) and Qí Dérén 齊德仁’s late-Yuán Yángyī dàquán 瘍醫大全 by more than a century; (b) the dialogic-pedagogical form: question-and-answer presentation, claimed to derive from a Daoist immortal teacher; (c) the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn preservation: without imperial-archive recovery, the work would have been entirely lost.
The catalog meta retains 東軒居士 (Dōngxuān jūshì) as the named author, mirroring the original preface; the prose makes clear this is a pseudonym.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western secondary literature on this specific work.
- Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Zhōng-yī wénxiàn xué 中醫文獻學, Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi Kēxué Jìshù Chūbǎnshè, 1990 (entry on the Wèi-jì bǎo-shū and the Yǒnglè recovery).
- Liào Yùqún 廖育群, Yī-xué yǔ chuán-tǒng wénhuà 醫學與傳統文化, Tianjin: Bǎihuā Wényì, 2002 (chapter on Chinese surgical history).
Other points of interest
The “not-old-mountain” 不老山 attribution and the dialogic form of the treatise locate the work in the Sòng Daoist-medical fringe, where surgical-pharmacological knowledge was transmitted under a religious-master-disciple framework. The SKQS editors’ diagnosis — the analysis is too precise to be merely fabulous, but the fabulous frame is not literally credible — is methodologically careful: a working specialist’s treatise has been dressed in the borrowed authority of a Daoist immortal.
The Wèijì bǎoshū’s 22-piān structure is one of the more developed Sòng surgical-medical pedagogies, anticipating the systematic external-medicine treatises of the YuánMíng (Wèi Yìlín, Qí Dérén) by more than a century.