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傷寒舌鑑

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Text ID
KR3eb054
Date
1668–1668
Dynasty
清

Shānghán Shé Jiàn 傷寒舌鑑

Tongue Mirror for Cold-Damage Disorders by 張登 (Zhāng Dēng, zì Dànxiān 誕先, fl. mid–late 17th c., 清)

About the work

A one-juan early-Qīng treatise on tongue diagnosis applied to cold-damage disorders — the most systematic continuation of the Áo / Dù KR3eb051 Jīnjìng lù tradition. Zhāng Dēng’s book takes the 137-figure Guān shé xīn fǎ 觀舌心法 of Shēn Dǒuyuán 申斗垣 (Wànlì era), corrects its errors, prunes its repetitions, integrates the clinical experience of Zhāng’s father 張璐 Zhāng Lù, and presents the resulting synthesis as a 120-figure tongue-diagnostic atlas organised by coating colour: 白苔 white (32 figures), 黃苔 yellow (24), 黑苔 black (20), 灰色 grey (10), 紅色 red (24), 紫色 purple (10), with closing sections on 黴醬色 mould-and-sauce, 藍色 indigo, and 妊娠 pregnancy-specific tongues. This colour-organised 120-figure scheme became the standard tongue-diagnostic taxonomy of the high Qīng and was the principal source of all subsequent tongue manuals down to KR3eb056 曹炳章 Cáo Bǐngzhāng’s Biàn shé zhǐ nán (1920).

Prefaces

KR3eb054_000.txt carries Zhāng’s self-preface dated 康熙戊申年秋月 = autumn 1668, written at the Juànyǒngtáng 雋永堂 (the family studio). The preface opens with a historiographical observation: in Zhāng Zhòngjǐng 張仲景’s text, only “white coating, slippery” 舌白苔滑 is mentioned, with no yellow, black, spiked, or fissured tongues; the proliferation of tongue figures begins only with the Jīnjìng lù (which adds 36) and then the Guān shé xīn fǎ (which extends to 137). Zhāng Dēng’s analysis: this is not because tongue states have multiplied historically, but because Shānghán — entering the body from without — initially produces only the canonical white slippery coating, with subsequent colour changes appearing only when the disease is mismanaged; therefore the entire post-Shānghánlùn tongue literature is essentially a documentation of mistreatment patterns and their indications. The preface notes that Zhāng’s selection criterion was Shānghán relevance — he therefore removed figures from the Xīn fǎ that he judged irrelevant to cold-damage disorders, and added a number from his own case practice and from his father’s yī àn 醫案.

Abstract

Zhāng Dēng was the son of 張璐 Zhāng Lù (1617–1700+) of Chángzhōu 長洲 (Sūzhōu), the dominant early-Qīng Shānghán physician and author of the Zhāng shì yī tōng 張氏醫通 (1695). His brother 張倬 Zhāng Zhuō was the author of the Shānghán xiǎng 傷寒鄉 (1696). The three Zhāng works — yī tōng, xiǎng, and shé jiàn — form the principal Sūzhōu Shānghán canon of the late 17th century. Zhāng Dēng’s precise lifedates are not recorded in CBDB; the existing Qīng biographical reference works place him as flourishing in the 1660s–80s, his clinical activity being closely entwined with his father’s. The book is sometimes cited under the alternative title Zhāngshì yītōng shé jiàn 張氏醫通舌鑑 because it was issued together with the yī tōng in subsequent reprints.

The doctrinal core is the colour-as-organ correspondence — white = Tàiyáng surface phase / lung-and-large-intestine; yellow = Yángmíng interior phase / stomach; black = renal water encroaching on cardiac fire (or alternatively, fire-exhaustion-imitating-water); grey = Shàoyáng / liver-and-gallbladder transitional or deep-internal San-yīn; red = blood-level pestilential heat; purple = alcohol-induced or terminal Juéyīn internalisation; indigo = liver-wood unchecked by cardiac-earth, prognostically nearly always fatal. Each figure is paired with a syndrome reading, a pulse correspondence, and a prescription; the book is therefore both an atlas (for visual identification) and a casebook (for clinical action).

The text closes with a substantial 妊娠舌總論 — a section on tongue diagnosis in pregnant patients with cold-damage disorders. This is one of the earliest sustained Chinese discussions of obstetric tongue-diagnostic prognosis and includes the famous diagnostic dictum “面以候母，舌以候子” — “the face indicates the mother, the tongue indicates the foetus” — a pithy formulation widely cited in subsequent gynaecological and tongue-diagnostic literature.

Note: the SKQS / WYG edition of the same work is catalogued separately as KR3e0093; the present jicheng.tw entry KR3eb054 is the textual mirror of that WYG witness.

Translations and research

  • Zhang, Ting-liang & Bob Flaws, Ao-shi’s Mirror of the Cold Damage (Boulder: Blue Poppy, 1995) — discusses Zhāng Dēng’s Shé jiàn as the high-Qīng synthesis of the Áo / Dù tradition.
  • Yáng Sēn 楊森 (ed.), Shānghán shé jiàn jiào zhù 傷寒舌鑑校注 (Beijing: Rénmín wèishēng, 1989) — standard modern critical edition.
  • Anthologised in: 曹炳章 Cáo Bǐngzhāng (ed.), Zhōngguó yī xué dà chéng 中國醫學大成 (Shanghai: Dàdōng shūjú, 1935–37).
  • Discussed in Liào Yùqún 廖育群, Liǎng Qīng yī xué shǐ 兩清醫學史 (Beijing: Zhōngguó kēxué, 2007).

Other points of interest

The 120-figure scheme of the Shé jiàn was directly extended by Liáng Tèyán 梁特岩’s Shé jiàn biàn zhèng 舌鑑辨正 (mid-Qīng) and by 曹炳章 Cáo Bǐngzhāng’s KR3eb056 Biàn shé zhǐ nán (1920); the entire post-1700 Chinese tongue-diagnostic literature is structurally a chain of expansions on Zhāng Dēng’s 1668 base.

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