Sì Zhěn Jué Wēi 四診抉微
Probing the Subtleties of the Four Diagnostics by 林之瀚 (Lín Zhīhàn, 字慎庵, fl. early-18th c., 清)
About the work
An eight-juan early-Qīng diagnostic synthesis that takes the classical fourfold sì zhěn 四診 (inspection 望, audition 聞, interrogation 問, palpation 切) as its organising frame and refits SòngYuánMíng material under it. Where most Míng pulse books had been organised around the twenty-eight pulse types alone, Lín Zhīhàn restores the Nèijīng 內經 hierarchy in which palpation is one of four diagnostics rather than the dominant one, and he is explicit that the older inspection-audition-interrogation triad (“望聞問”) is the “tally-stick” (符節) for the pulse and must precede it. The book interweaves citations from the Sùwèn, Língshū, Nànjīng, Wáng Shūhé’s KR3eb011 Mài jīng, Cuī Jiāyàn’s 紫虛 mnemonic, the Shānghán lùn 傷寒論, Zhū Zhènhēng 朱震亨, Huá Shòu 滑壽, Lǐ Shízhēn 李時珍, Zhāng Jǐngyuè 張景岳, Yú Tuán 喻嘉言, and Lín’s elder Shěn Guǒlú 沈果廬, each tagged with its source. Two of its more polemical sections are the Cún yí 存疑 (challenging the post-Sòng practice of attaching the large and small intestines to the cubit position) and the Dìng rén yíng qìkǒu fēn zuǒ yòu qiān hé zhī shī 訂人迎氣口分左右牽合之失 (against Wáng Shūhé’s having allocated the rényíng 人迎 and qìkǒu 氣口 to left-and-right wrist positions rather than to neck-and-wrist as in the Língshū).
Prefaces
KR3eb003_000.txt carries the prose front-matter (origin and function of pulse, philological appendices, ordering of the diagnostics) and the postface (跋) by Lín’s disciple Wú Guān 吳冠. Wú reports that the work was shown to him by his teacher in finished form and that fellow disciple Zhāng Shàoyuǎn 張紹遠 successfully argued for its publication rather than its concealment (“藏之名山，曷若懸之國門”). The jicheng.tw file does not preserve a dated authorial preface, but the work is reliably dated to the Yōngzhèng 雍正 era (publication conventionally given as 1723) on the basis of editions outside this corpus.
Abstract
Lín Zhīhàn 林之瀚, zì Shèn’ān 慎庵, was a Yínxiàn 鄞縣 (Níngbō) physician active in the late Kāngxī and early Yōngzhèng periods. He is not in CBDB; the chief evidence for his life is the front-matter of this book and citations in later Qīng medical compendia. The Sì zhěn jué wēi is his principal work; he organises the inherited material under the four diagnostics and intervenes with his own clinical judgements (signed Shèn’ān àn 慎庵按). Many of the more interesting passages are critiques of received doctrine: he defends Wáng Shūhé’s allocation of the large and small intestines to the cùn 寸 position against the Yuán innovation (initiated by Huá Shòu 滑壽 and amplified by Yú Jiāyán 喻嘉言) of moving them to the chǐ 尺; he rejects Wáng Shūhé’s left-right partition of rényíng and qìkǒu; and he insists that the four diagnostics must be applied jointly, the prevailing late-Míng emphasis on pulse-alone being a clinical pathology. The work was widely consulted in late-Qīng medical education and is one of the standard “four-diagnostic” handbooks of the Qing.
Translations and research
- No full Western-language translation exists.
- The Sì zhěn jué wēi is treated in Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: UC Press, 1985), as a representative of the early-Qīng “literati medicine” (rúyī 儒醫) that re-canonised the Nèijīng hierarchy against the late-Míng pulse monomania.
- 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), gives the standard textual history. A modern punctuated edition by Bāo Lái-fā 包來發 was published by Shànghǎi kēxué jìshù 上海科學技術出版社 (1995).
Links
- Wikidata: not assigned.
- 四診抉微 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB