Yī Jiē Biàn Zhèng 醫階辨證
Stepwise Differential Diagnosis by 汪必昌 (Wāng Bìchāng, 字聊復, fl. 1800s, 清)
About the work
A one-juan handbook of differential diagnosis pitched as a working pocket reference for the practitioner — a jiē 階 (set of “steps” or “rungs”) through which to climb in differentiating clinically confusable patterns. The book is arranged as a long sequence of pairwise / triplet contrasts: “sudden onset zhōng 中 vs. sudden jué 厥,” “biàn fēng zhòng 辨風中 — wind, fire, and damp varieties,” “biàn piān kū 偏枯 — three patterns,” “biàn rè 真熱 / 假熱,” and so on, each item set out as a short paragraph naming the pattern, its decisive features, and the clinical distinction that separates it from its near-relatives. The architecture is taxonomic rather than discursive, allowing the reader to identify a pattern by elimination. Wāng Bìchāng was attached to the Imperial Medical Academy (太醫院) in the Jiāqìng reign and his style reflects the academy’s emphasis on clear-cut clinical decision-making over speculative theorising.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw _000.txt retains only the work’s table of contents and main text and does not preserve a dated preface. Wāng’s better-attested work Yī jiē sì zhěn 醫階四診 (1809) was printed in his collection Liáo fú lǎo rén suì cài 聊復老人碎采, of which the Biàn zhèng is the syndromic-differential companion volume; the conventional dating of the Yī jiē biàn zhèng to 1809 follows the parent collection.
Abstract
Wāng Bìchāng 汪必昌, zì Liáofù 聊復 (also written 聊聖 in some editions), was an early-19th-century Imperial Medical Academy physician from Xīn’ān 新安 (Anhui). He produced a set of clinical handbooks — Liáo fú lǎo rén suì cài 聊復老人碎采 (six titles, c. 1809) — of which the Yī jiē biàn zhèng is one volume. He is not in CBDB; biographical material is limited to the prefaces to his own compositions. The Biàn zhèng covers approximately one hundred and twenty differential-diagnosis pairs across the standard internal-medicine, gynaecological, paediatric, and external-medicine categories. Wāng’s identification of huǒzhòng 火中 (Liú Hé jiān 劉河間’s “spontaneous flaring of cardiac fire”) and shīzhòng 濕中 (Zhū Zhènhēng 朱震亨’s shī shēng tán → tán shēng rè → rè shēng fēng) as “类中风” diagnoses distinct from true wind-stroke is taken straight from the Jīn-Yuán doctrinal heritage, but Wāng’s exposition foregrounds the clinical differentia (presence or absence of fever, sweating, aversion to wind) rather than the speculative aetiology.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
- No substantial secondary literature located. Modern Chinese reprints are included in the Xīn’ān yī jí cóng kān 新安醫籍叢刊 series and in the Zhōng yī gǔ jí zhěn běn cóng kān 中醫古籍珍本叢刊.
Links
- Wikidata: not assigned.
- 醫階辨證 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB