Shíshān yīàn 石山醫案
The Stone-Mountain Medical Cases by 陳桷 (Chén Jué, fl. mid-16th c., of Qímén, 明) — compiler
About the work
The collected medical cases of 汪機 Wāng Jī (hào Shíshān 石山, “Stone Mountain”) in 3 juan, gathered by Wāng’s disciple Chén Jué from the case-records kept by various of Wāng’s students. Each juan is loosely organized by disease-category. The work is one of the principal documents of the mid-Míng yīàn (medical case-record) genre, and the principal source for Wāng Jī’s clinical practice. The SKQS recension preserves several appended materials: an essay Bìng yòng shēnqí lùn 病用參耆論 (the use of rénshēn and huángqí in disease) by Wāng’s disciple Chéng Jiào 程鐈; Wāng’s own xíngzhuàng 行狀 (action-record / mini-biography) of his father; and Lǐ Xùn’s 李汛 xiǎozhuàn 小傳 (small biography) of Wāng. The work also contains Wāng’s polemic against Wángshì Míngyī zázhù 明醫雜著 (which clung too rigidly to Dānxī school’s cooling pharmacotherapy) — flagging that even though Wāng Jī was a Dān-xī-school transmitter (via 戴原禮’s line), he was not a rigid doctrinal partisan and treated each case on its merits.
Tiyao
Shíshān yīàn, 3 juan, compiled by Chén Jué of the Míng. Jué was a man of Qímén; he studied medicine with the same-county Wāng Jī. He took the records of Wāng’s clinical effective-treatments by Wāng’s various disciples, and gathered them into a collection. Each juan is broadly divided into categorical sub-headings.
Since the Sòng and Jīn, the Tàipíng huìmín héjì jú fāng (Jú fāng) circulated in the South; Héjiān’s Yuánbìng shì and Xuānmíng lùn fāng circulated in the North. The Jú fāng used many warm-and-drying medicines; the Héjiān school took fire-clearing as its principal strategy — the flow-on errors are also similarly disposed.
The Yuán Zhū Zhènhēng first corrected the Júfāng’s bias and worked-around the Héjiān’s transformation, and the yīn-supplementing doctrine emerged. Wāng Jī’s Tuīqiú shī yì in fact derives from Dài Yuánlǐ to trace back to Zhènhēng, so his persistent argument largely follows the Dānxī method.
But Wángshì’s Míngyī zázhù clings to Dānxī, with a tendency to over-use bitter-cool [medicines]; Wāng Jī wrote a discussion to refute this — the text is appended at the end of the Yīàn. So Wāng Jī also responded to symptoms in prescribing, not bound to any single template; his successful applications had a basis.
The old base copy further has a Bìng yòng shēnqí lùn (the Use of Ginseng and Astragalus in Disease) by Wāng’s disciple Chéng Jiào, and Wāng’s own xíngzhuàng of his father, and Lǐ Xùn’s xiǎozhuàn of Wāng — all included for reference.
(Respectfully verified, 6th month of Qiánlóng 43 [1778]. Chief Compilers Jì Yún, Lù Xīxióng, Sūn Shìyì; Chief Collator Lù Fèichí.)
Abstract
Composition window: 1539 (Wāng Jī’s death year) to 1560 (Chén Jué’s likely active period upper-bound). The compilation is post-Wāng Jī, gathering his clinical material posthumously.
The work’s significance:
(a) The principal documentation of Wāng Jī’s clinical practice: the Shíshān yīàn is the major source for Wāng’s actual clinical reasoning, complementing his theoretical works (Zhēnjiǔ wènduì KR3e0072, Wàikē lǐlì KR3e0073). Through the case-records, Wāng’s flexible-judgment medical-school transmission can be observed in action.
(b) The Wāng’s anti-rigid-Dān-xī polemic: the appended polemic against the Míngyī zázhù’s rigid Dānxī interpretation establishes that Wāng — despite being a Dān-xī-school inheritor — was not a doctrinal partisan. The position is methodologically careful and clinically responsible.
(c) The integrated Wāng Jī corpus: the work’s appendices (Chéng Jiào’s Shēnqí lùn, Wāng’s father’s xíngzhuàng, Lǐ Xùn’s xiǎozhuàn) make the volume a complete biographical-clinical-doctrinal portrait of Wāng. The integration is one of the more carefully-edited Míng yīàn productions.
(d) The mid-Míng yīàn genre: continuing from 許叔微’s Běnshì fāng (KR3e0032) and 薛己’s case-records (KR3e0070), the Shíshān yīàn is part of the mature Míng-period yīàn tradition that combined theoretical medical-school identity with detailed individual-case documentation.
The catalog meta dynasty 明 is correct.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western translation of this specific work.
- See KR3e0072 for principal references on Wāng Jī.
- Furth, Charlotte, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung (eds.), Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007 (treats the yī-àn genre).
- Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Zhōng-yī wénxiàn xué 中醫文獻學, Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi Kēxué Jìshù Chūbǎnshè, 1990 (entry on the Shíshān yī-àn).
Other points of interest
The mid-Míng yīàn tradition — of which this work is a major exemplar — represents one of the most influential Chinese medical-pedagogical genres. The case-and-prescription pairing, with discussion of diagnostic reasoning, served both clinical pedagogy and medical-school doctrinal propagation. Through the yīàn genre, the late-imperial Chinese medical schools achieved their characteristic combination of theoretical-doctrinal and clinical-experiential identity.
The polemic against the Míngyī zázhù — preserved as the work’s closing piece — is one of the more useful Míng-period intra-Dān-xī-school dispute documents, illustrating that doctrinal-school identity in late-imperial Chinese medicine was always provisional and subject to internal correction.