Pàozhì Quánshū 炮炙全書 / Hōseki Zensho
Complete Book of Drug Processing by 稻生宣義 (Inō Nobuyoshi 稻生宣義, conventionally Inō Jakusui 稻生若水, 1655–1715, 江戶)
About the work
The Pàozhì quánshū (Japanese reading: Hōseki zensho — though the work is consistently cited in Chinese contexts as Pàozhì quánshū) is the principal Edo-period Japanese drug-processing manual. Compiled by Inō Jakusui in his Kaga-period, it draws on the Chinese Léi Xiào 雷斆 / Miù Xīyōng 繆希雍 pàozhì tradition — particularly Miù’s Pàozhì dàfǎ KR3ec088 — and adapts the seventeen-method framework for Japanese pharmaceutical practice, with particular attention to substances that had to be substituted in Japan because of supply limitations.
The work covers approximately 500 substances in 4 maki. For each, Inō specifies the appropriate Chinese-tradition pàozhì method, the auxiliary substances (which often have to be Japanese-adapted — Japanese shōchū substituted for Chinese rice-wine, the various Japanese honey grades calibrated against the Chinese honey types, etc.), and the resulting pharmacological transformation. The appendix to the surviving local-repository edition includes a section on fùlù 附錄 entries treating substances of indeterminate or controversial classification — among them a remarkable entry on 番藥 (foreign drugs), including a discussion of 密伊辣 mìyīlà (= Latin mumia, mummy-flesh, the famous early-modern European medicament of supposedly preserved Egyptian corpse-matter, which reached East Asia through the Dutch trade and is here described in some detail, including the report that Western potentates bury their dead in stone coffins filled with aromatic spices and that the resulting mummified material, when dug up after long burial, is collected by foreigners for use in medicine).
The work is one of the principal documents of the Genroku-Kyōhō Japanese pharmacological scholarship and of the broader Inō Jakusui Shobutsu ruisan project. Its inclusion of foreign drug entries reflects the contemporary Japanese awareness of the emerging global pharmaceutical trade.
Prefaces
The local repository preserves the substance body in 3 maki plus the fùlù appendix. The frontmatter file is present.
Abstract
Inō Jakusui (稻生若水 / Nobuyoshi 宣義, 1655–1715). See his person note. The Pàozhì quánshū is one of his major standalone works, alongside the great Shobutsu ruisan encyclopaedia that occupied his last twenty years.
The work’s significance is as the principal Japanese Edo-period systematisation of drug processing — both as a translation/adaptation of the Chinese pàozhì tradition to Japanese pharmaceutical practice and as a document of the emerging Japanese honzōgaku methodology that combined fidelity to the Chinese pharmacological tradition with serious attention to the Japanese supply situation. The work is the principal Edo-period Japanese pàozhì reference and was widely used by the Edo honzōgaku and Kohōha schools alike.
The catalog meta gives the dynasty as 清 — true to the Chinese-calendar dating of Inō’s lifetime but the work is Japanese.
Translations and research
- Marcon, Federico. 2015. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan. UCP. — major treatment of Inō and the Shobutsu ruisan project.
- Yabuuchi Kiyoshi 藪內清, ed. 1970. Nihon no honzōgaku.
- No modern critical edition; no Western-language translation of the Pàozhì quánshū specifically.
Other points of interest
The appendix’s treatment of 密伊辣 (mumia) is one of the principal Japanese documentary records of the East Asian reception of the early-modern European mumia trade. The substance was a major item in 16th–17th-c. European pharmacy and reached East Asia through the Portuguese, Dutch, and English East-India Company trade; its appearance in Inō’s appendix is a small but striking witness to the global pharmaceutical exchange of the period.
Links
- Wikipedia (ja): 稲生若水.
- Wikidata: Q11525007 (Inō Jakusui).
- 炮炙全書 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB