Zhèng Zhì Xīn Chuán 證治心傳
Mind-Transmission on Patterns and Treatments by 袁班 (Yuán Bān, 字體庵 Tǐān, fl. late Wànlì through Chóngzhēn, 高郵 [Jiāngsū], 明末)
About the work
A one-juan late-Ming clinical handbook by Yuán Bān, a mùbīn 幕賓 (military-staff adviser and physician) attached to the Ming-loyalist general Shǐ Kěfǎ 史可法. The book belongs to the xīn dé 心得 genre — short essays on doctrinal points crystallised from clinical practice, designed for transmission “mind to mind” (心傳) rather than as systematic exposition. Yuán Bān’s positioning, in his own and Shǐ Kěfǎ’s prefaces, is explicitly polemical: he condemns the late-Ming medical literature for mere paraphrase and recombination of received material (摭拾前人牙慧，割裂補竄，攘為己有以博名) and presents his own work as a reckoned judgement of the inherited doctrine against personal verification. The book covers pulse diagnosis, the liù yín 六淫 disorders, the major internal-medicine syndromes, and women’s medicine; it is one of the smaller and more interesting Ming-loyalist medical productions of the JiāngHuái region.
Prefaces
KR3eb010_000.txt opens with Shǐ Kěfǎ’s preface, dated Chóngzhēn suì cì guǐwèi zhòng qiū yuè 崇禎歲次癸未仲秋月 = mid-autumn, 1643 — that is, eighteen months before Shǐ’s death at Yángzhōu in 1645. Shǐ identifies Yuán as his mùbīn and praises his refusal to plagiarise: “他者折衷諸家，參以臨證經驗，有疑似難明者，發揮奧蘊.” The signature line — bīng bù shǐ zhě Lìyáng Shǐ Kěfǎ shí 兵部使者溧陽史可法識 — establishes both the date and the relationship.
Abstract
Yuán Bān 袁班, zì Tǐān 體庵, came from the area of Pearl Lake (珠湖, Gāoyóu 高郵, Jiāngsū) and is known almost exclusively through this preface and his own work. He served as Shǐ Kěfǎ’s mùbīn and physician during the dying years of the Míng. Stylistically the book sits between the philosophical-medical writing of the Zhū Zhènhēng 朱震亨 school and the late-Ming clinical pragmatism of Yú Tuán 喻嘉言; Yuán cites Liú Wánsù 劉完素 and Zhū Zhènhēng by name. He is not in CBDB, but Shǐ Kěfǎ’s authentication anchors the date and the social position. The Xīn chuán was preserved through manuscript transmission in JiāngHuái medical circles and was first widely printed in the Qing through the Jí xué xuān cóng shū 集學軒叢書 of Lǔ Chóngwǔ 魯崇五. Modern scholars use it as a witness to the late-Ming reception of the JīnYuán doctrines outside the SūZhè coastal medical metropolises.
Translations and research
- No Western-language translation exists.
- Yú Yǒngmǐn 余瀛鰲 et al., eds., Zhōng yī gǔ jí xī jiàn cóng kān 中醫古籍稀見叢刊 (Beijing: Zhōngyī gǔjí), reprints the Zhèng zhì xīn chuán with annotation.
- Mǎ Jìxīng 馬繼興, Zhōng yī wén xiàn xué 中醫文獻學 (Shanghai: Shàng-hǎi kēxué jìshù, 1990), discusses the work as a representative late-Ming xīn dé compendium.
Other points of interest
The work’s principal historical interest lies less in its medical doctrine than in its provenance: Shǐ Kěfǎ’s preface places it firmly within the Ming-loyalist administrative literary culture of the JiāngHuái defence in 1643. Yuán Bān’s mùbīn status would have placed him in Shǐ’s fǔ 府 in Yángzhōu, and the book — completed and printed within the eighteen months before that city’s annihilation — survives as a small intellectual artefact of the late-Ming defence administration.
Links
- Wikidata: not assigned.
- 證治心傳 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB