Chá Bìng Zhǐ Nán 察病指南
A Guide to the Examination of Illness by 施發 (Shī Fā, 字政卿, 號桂堂, fl. 1190s–1240s, 南宋)
About the work
A three-juan Southern-Sòng manual of clinical examination organised around the classical four-fold inspection — colour, voice, somatic signs, and pulse — but with disproportionate weight on pulse diagnosis, for which it is the principal Sòng witness. The work is notable for being one of the earliest illustrated Chinese pulse texts: it contains thirty-three schematic diagrams (脈氣象圖) charting the visualised image of each pulse type, an innovation often credited as the predecessor of the illustrated pulse charts in later Yuán and Míng compilations. Shī Fā draws his material from the four canonical sources he names in his own preface (《靈樞》, 《素問》, 《太素》, 《甲乙》, 《難經》) plus the pulse and formulary literature, sieving the received tradition for points “easy to understand and clinically tested” (言之明白易曉，余嘗用之而驗者).
Prefaces
The file KR3eb002_000.txt carries three paratexts: (1) Shī Fā’s own preface dated Chúnyòu gǎiyuán jiǔyuè Lìdōng hòu sì rì 淳祐改元九月立冬後四日 = the fourth day after Beginning-of-Winter, ninth lunar month of 淳祐 1 = 1241, signed 永嘉施發政卿; (2) a foreword dated Chúnyòu yǐsì liáng yuè 淳祐乙巳良月 = 1245, by Zhào Yǔzī 趙與諮 (a member of the Sòng imperial clan, 冀邸); (3) a postface dated Chúnyòu bǐngwǔ zhèngyuè zhōng huàn 淳祐丙午正月中澣 = 1246, by Zhào Chónghè 趙崇賀 (also of the imperial clan, hào 澹齊). Shī’s own preface explains that he turned to medicine after abandoning the examination track around age fifty (年將知命), motivated by epidemics in which patients with yáng disorders had been killed by inappropriate prescriptions of guìfù 桂附 (cinnamon-aconite).
Abstract
Shī Fā 施發, zì Zhèngqīng 政卿, hào Guìtáng 桂堂, was a Yǒngjiā 永嘉 (Wēnzhōu) physician of the Southern Sòng, traditionally given the lifedates 1190–1268 on the basis of his preface (“年將知命” = c. 50 sui = 1241 gives a birth-date c. 1190; no firm death-date is recorded). He is not in CBDB. The catalog dating of Chá bìng zhǐ nán to 1241 follows the author’s own preface. Shī also wrote a Xù yì jiǎn fāng 續易簡方 (companion to Wáng Shuòzhī’s Yì jiǎn fāng zhī lùn) and a Běn cǎo biàn yì 本草辨異; only the Chá bìng zhǐ nán is preserved intact in the jicheng.tw corpus. The text was kept in circulation through Yuán and Míng manuscript copies and is one of the principal Sòng sources from which Yuán pulse compilations (e.g. Huá Shòu’s Zhěn jiā shū yào KR3eb023 and Dài Qǐzōng’s Mài jué kān wù KR3eb026) draw their phrasing. The thirty-three pulse-image diagrams are not preserved in all witnesses; the jicheng.tw file follows the prose stratum of the work without reproducing the figures.
Translations and research
- Catherine Despeux, “Visualization and Diagrammatic Thought in Sòng-Yuán Medicine,” in Innovation in Chinese Medicine, ed. Elisabeth Hsu (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), discusses Shī Fā’s pulse diagrams as a hinge between the Sòng tú-shū 圖書 movement and the later illustrated pulse tradition.
- Elisabeth Hsu, Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), cites Chá bìng zhǐ nán as one of the earliest Sòng witnesses to a stable 28-pulse classification.
- Zhèng Jīnshēng 鄭金生 et al., Lìdài Zhōng yī wén xiàn xìn xī tí yào 歷代中醫文獻信息提要 (Beijing: Renmin weisheng, 1997), §宋·察病指南, gives a transmission history.
Links
- Wikidata Q-id: not assigned.
- 察病指南 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB