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舌診問答

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Text ID
KR3eb055
Date
1947–1947
Dynasty
民國

Shé Zhěn Wèn Dá 舌診問答

Questions and Answers on Tongue Diagnosis by 何舒 (Hé Shū, hào Shěyǔlǎorén 舍予老人, fl. 1947, 民國)

About the work

A short single-juan tongue-diagnostic catechism in question-and-answer format, composed in the late Republican period (1947). The text is divided into an Upper Section 上篇 and a Lower Section 下篇 of paired questions and answers, framed by a five-quatrain Shé zhěn tí yào 舌診提要 (“Tongue-Diagnosis Essentials in Verse”) and closed by an appendix that excerpts 陳修園 Chén Xiūyuán’s Biàn shé shī 辨舌詩, the Wàng sè shī 望色詩, the Wén shēng shī 聞聲詩, and a long section from the Yī zōng jīn jiàn 醫宗金鑑’s wàngsèwénshēng xīn fǎ 望色聞聲心法. The book is a pedagogical synthesis rather than an original treatise — its primary value is in compressing the Qīng tongue-diagnostic doctrine (especially that of Áo / Dù KR3eb051 and 張登 Zhāng Dēng KR3eb054) into a memorisable Q-and-A form suitable for early-Republican medical-school students.

Prefaces

KR3eb055_000.txt opens with the five-quatrain verse preface signed 舍予老人 (“the old man who has cast aside the self”) on 中華民國三十六年兒童節 = 4 April 1947 (Children’s Day, the standard ROC date). The five quatrains state the work’s diagnostic axioms in classical heptasyllabic form:

  1. “萬舉萬全色脈同，軒岐垂教振癡聓” — the canonical equivalence of colour and pulse diagnostics, traced to the Yellow Emperor tradition.
  2. “燥潤分來病可求，紅黃黑白辨根由” — the dry-moist axis paired with the four-colour axis.
  3. “金加火上舌如霜，鬱熱如焚勢莫當，勿謂陰寒皆色白，須知物極變非常” — the principle that white is not always cold, since extreme heat can also bleach the tongue (a deliberate inversion of the standard reading).
  4. “色變非常陰症多，勿因紅點計乖訛” — the warning against treating non-canonical colour changes as automatic indicators of yīn syndrome.
  5. “君火光明相不乘，黑苔水盛土由崩” — the jūnhuǒ / xiànghuǒ (sovereign vs. ministerial fire) framework as the master diagnostic schema.

Abstract

Hé Shū is unattested in CBDB and in the major Republican biographical reference works. The self-designation Shěyǔlǎorén — a phrase with mild Confucian-Buddhist overtones suggesting renunciation of self-interest — and the 1947 dating place him as a senior Republican-era physician active in the last years before 1949.

The book’s doctrinal commitments are conservative and traditional: it sides explicitly with 陳修園 Chén Xiūyuán (the early-19th-century Mǐnpài 閩派 Shānghán synthesiser) and against the Wēnbìng 溫病 school. The Q-and-A pedagogy is deliberately old-fashioned — Hé Shū sets himself against the new, science-influenced tongue-diagnostic manuals of the 1910s–30s (the work of 劉恆瑞 Liú Héngruì KR3eb053 and 曹炳章 Cáo Bǐngzhāng KR3eb056), preferring the yùnqì 運氣 framework and the jūnhuǒ / xiànghuǒ doctrinal schema. Two passages are especially distinctive:

  • The defence of temperature-mediated tongue inversion: Hé argues, against the Wēnbìng school, that the post-Wēnbìng equation black tongue = heat-extreme is mistaken in seven cases out of ten; he maintains the older Shānghán reading that black tongues in the great majority of clinical cases indicate vacuity-cold (“舌色反常而虛寒者，十有七八，此三陰病也”), and warns against the indiscriminate use of Coptis-Scutellaria-Gypsum prescriptions.
  • A precise and slightly idiosyncratic prescription geography: red dots on a non-reversed tongue = real heat; red dots on a reversed tongue = vacuity heat; tongues like silkworm-board hard-yellow / hard-black = one-in-a-hundred survival.

The closing appendix anthologises Chén Xiūyuán’s Biàn shé shī and a long Wàng sè / Wén shēng synthesis lifted from the Yī zōng jīn jiàn’s diagnostics volume. The book ends with the proverb-like dictum “陽絕戴眼，陰脫目盲” — “when yang exhausts, the eyes stare upward; when yin escapes, the eyes go blind.”

Translations and research

  • No Western-language translation exists.
  • No substantial secondary literature located. The work circulates within the Zhōng yī shé zhěn cān kǎo anthology tradition but has attracted no monographic study.

Other points of interest

The work is one of the very last Chinese tongue-diagnostic manuals in the classical idiom: written in literary Chinese with full classical citation apparatus, defending the yùnqì framework, and explicitly polemicising against the new science-influenced Republican tongue manuals. After 1949 the genre transforms into clinical-pedagogical textbooks tied to TCM educational curricula; Hé Shū’s 1947 Wèn dá is effectively the closing document of the old style.

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