Mài Què 脈確
Pulse Verified by 黃韞兮 (Huáng Yùnxī, of Shíyáng 石陽 [Jiāngxī], fl. early Qiánlóng, 清)
About the work
A single-juan early-Qiánlóng pulse-verification treatise by Huáng Yùnxī of Shíyáng 石陽 (Jiāngxī). The book’s distinctive framing, set out in the author’s recorded vivā voce in Chéng Yín’s preface, is the suspicion that pulse exposition has always been theoretically refined but never practically certain: “the Mài xué literature is full of statements that sound good, indeed too good — but they have never been certain (確) under the finger.” Huáng accordingly takes the Sùwèn and Língshū as his anchor and accepts material from later authors only where it can be verified (確) — either by classical citation or by personal clinical confirmation. The book was finished some time before 1746 and was printed by the Hùizhōu / Shèzhōu 歙州 (Anhui) physician-bibliophile Chéng Yín 程崟 as a companion volume to Huáng’s own Shānghán lùn yì 傷寒論翼.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw _000.txt carries: (1) Chéng Yín’s printing preface dated Qiánlóng bǐngyín xiǎo chūn 乾隆丙寅小春 = winter (tenth lunar month) of 1746, recording that the Shānyáng 山陽 physician Lǐ Zhùjiǔ 李鑄九 and the Zhēnzhōu 真洲 physician Lǐ Qiáonián 李喬年 both endorsed the work and urged its publication alongside the Shānghán lùn yì; (2) the appended Sòng Dài Yuánlǐ huán Pǔyáng xù 附送戴原禮還浦陽序 by Sòng Lián 宋濂 (1310–1381) — a Ming-founding-era preface celebrating the Yuán-Ming physician Dài Sīgōng 戴思恭 (字原禮) — and a further piece Zèng yī shī Gě mǒu xù 贈醫師葛某序, also by Sòng Lián. The two Sòng Lián prefaces appear to have been included as paratexts for their general defence of the Nèijīng tradition over the Sòng-era Dàguān fāng 大觀方 commercial-formulary literature; they are independent compositions, not by Huáng Yùnxī.
Abstract
Huáng Yùnxī 黃韞兮, of Shíyáng 石陽 in Jiāngxī, is not in CBDB and is otherwise scarcely attested; his surviving compositions are the Mài què and the Shānghán lùn yì (commentary on the Zhāng Zhòngjǐng tradition). His diagnostic stance is conservative — Nèijīng-first, sceptical of late-Míng pulse novelties — and his prose is unusually compact (the typical paragraph is a single sentence introducing the pulse, followed by one sentence of clinical illustration). The polemical thrust of the work, evident in its title, is against the open-ended speculation about pulse signatures that had proliferated in the late Ming and that the early-Qing “返古” movement (epitomised by Xú Dàchūn 徐大椿 and Yú Jiāyán 喻嘉言) sought to discipline by reverting to the Nèijīng. The book was reprinted in the 19th and 20th centuries in several Anhui medical cóngshū series.
Translations and research
- No Western-language translation exists.
- Modern Chinese reprint in the Xīn’ān yī jí cóng kān 新安醫籍叢刊 (Hefei: Anhui kexue jishu, 1990).
Other points of interest
The volume is bibliographically interesting for its preservation of the two Sòng Lián prefaces on Dài Sīgōng (Dài Yuánlǐ 戴原禮), one of the principal disciples of Zhū Zhènhēng 朱震亨 and the conduit through which the Dānxī tradition passed into early-Ming Zhèjiāng practice. Sòng Lián’s Sòng Dài Yuánlǐ huán Pǔyáng xù is conventionally cited as a key biographical source for Dài Sīgōng; its preservation here, in a Qing pulse-text printed in Anhui in 1746, is one of the more accessible witnesses to the text.
Links
- Related to Sòng Lián’s biographical writing: 戴思恭.
- Wikidata: not assigned.
- 脈確 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB