Hànyào Yánjiū Gāngyào 漢藥研究綱要 / Kan’yaku Kenkyū Kōyō
Outline of Research on Chinese Drugs by 久保田晴光 (Kubota Seimitsu 久保田晴光, 1879–1944, 昭和)
About the work
The Kan’yaku kenkyū kōyō is a comprehensive Japanese-language survey of Chinese materia medica produced in the late 1920s / 1930s during the period of intensive Japanese pharmacological investigation of Chinese drug commerce — itself part of the broader colonial-pharmacological agenda of the South Manchurian Railway research apparatus. The work is organised around the actual contemporary drug commerce rather than around the textual pharmacopoeia tradition: Chapter 1 surveys the concept of Kan’yaku (Chinese drugs) and tabulates which substances were actually stocked at major Chinese pharmacies (奉天, 營口, 祁州, 天津 — the four principal north-Chinese pharmaceutical entrepots), distinguishing the 300 or so substances that constitute a standard commercial drug-store inventory from the 1,892 substances listed in 李時珍 Lǐ Shízhēn’s Gāngmù KR3ec025 and the 700+ added by 趙學敏 Zhào Xuémǐn’s Gāngmù shíyí KR3ec049.
The work’s distinctive contribution is the commercial-pharmacognostic angle. Where contemporary Chinese pharmacopoeias (e.g. Zhāng Shòuyí’s 張壽頤 Běncǎo zhèngyì KR3ec063) treated substances in the textual-traditional manner, Kubota documented the actual contemporary drug market: which Chinese substances were available, in what grades and pricings, with what provincial origins, and through what trade routes. The book is the principal documentary source for the historical pharmacology of north China in the 1930s and an important counterpart to the contemporary Chinese pharmacognostic studies of Zhèng Xiāoyán’s 鄭肖岩 and Cáo Bǐngzhāng’s 曹炳章 Zēngdìng wěi yào tiáo biàn KR3ec071.
Prefaces
The local repository preserves the full text including the introductory survey chapters. Standard editions preserve Kubota’s preface.
Abstract
Kubota Seimitsu (久保田晴光, 1879–1944), early-Shōwa Japanese pharmacologist. See his person note.
The work’s significance is twofold. As a pharmacology, it is one of the principal early-20th-century Japanese surveys of contemporary Chinese drug practice — an indispensable source for the history of pharmacology in early-Republican / Mínguó-era China. As a document of Japanese colonial pharmacology, it belongs to the larger 1920s–40s body of Japanese-language pharmacological literature on Chinese drugs produced under the auspices of the South Manchurian Railway research bureaucracy and the Japanese colonial-medical establishment in northeast China.
The catalog meta gives the dynasty as 民國 — appropriate to the Chinese setting of Kubota’s research, though the work itself is Japanese.
Translations and research
- Liu, Michael Shiyung. 2009. Prescribing Colonization: The Role of Medical Practices and Policies in Japan-Ruled Taiwan. AAS. — contextualises Japanese pharmacological surveys.
- Yip, Ka-che. 2009. Disease, Colonialism, and the State: Malaria in Modern East Asian History. HKU Press.
- No modern critical edition or Western-language translation.
Links
- Wikidata: not yet assigned.
- 漢藥研究綱要 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB