Jíjiù Xiānfāng 急救仙方
Immortal Recipes for Emergency Rescue anonymous Sòng-era emergency formulary
About the work
The Jíjiù xiānfāng in 6 juǎn is an anonymous Sòng-era emergency-medicine formulary, recovered by the Sìkù editors from the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典 and reconstituted in 6 juǎn. The catalog meta records no author and no Ming or earlier print witness; the Sìkù tíyào discusses the work’s likely Sòng origin on internal pharmacological and bibliographic grounds (use of Sòng drug-names and dose units, citation of Júfāng recipes, absence of Yuán-era materia medica terminology).
The work covers emergency conditions: traumatic injury (knife, sword, fall, bite), toxic exposure (snake, scorpion, mineral), acute fever and stroke, choking, drowning, sudden onset of severe pain, and obstetric emergency. The xiānfāng “immortal recipes” of the title reflects the work’s Daoist-religious presentation framework — many recipes are framed as having been transmitted by Daoist immortals or Buddhist bodhisattvas, and the recipes are accompanied by short ritual instructions (incantation, hand-gesture, directional orientation) consistent with the Sòng jiàoyī 醮醫 religious-medical tradition.
Prefaces
The hxwd transmission opens directly into the medical text without a preface; the text was reconstructed from Yǒnglè dàdiǎn quotations and any original prefaces did not survive.
Abstract
The work is an anonymous Sòng-era emergency manual of uncertain authorship. The catalog meta correctly records “no author”; the dynasty is assigned to 宋 on bibliographic grounds. The 1100–1279 bracket reflects the conventional Sòng range; precise dating is unrecoverable.
The work’s significance:
- Religious-medical hybrid. The Jíjiù xiānfāng is one of the cleaner Sòng-era witnesses to emergency medicine practised in a religious-ritual frame — the kind of medicine that the imperial Tàiyī jú curriculum increasingly tried to separate from “professional” medicine but that continued to dominate popular medical practice. Many recipes pair a pharmaceutical preparation with a ritual instruction.
- Survival via the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn. The work’s preservation only in the great Ming encyclopaedia makes it a useful case study in the role of imperial reference works in preserving secondary-tier Sòng medical literature.
- Reception in Korean and Japanese medicine. The work was widely cited in Yi-dynasty Korean medical compendia (the Hyangyak chipsŏngbang 鄉藥集成方 of 1433 contains substantial Jíjiù xiānfāng extracts) and in Heian / Kamakura Japanese medical literature.
Translations and research
- Hé Shíxī 何時希 (coll.). 1989. Jíjiù xiānfāng 急救仙方 (punctuated edition).
- Strickmann, Michel. 2002. Chinese Magical Medicine. Stanford UP — discusses the xiānfāng genre.
- Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §41.3.2.
Other points of interest
The work’s pairing of pharmaceutical recipes with incantatory ritual is one of the clearest documented Sòng-era forms of zhùyóu 祝由 practice outside of the imperial Shèngjì zǒnglù (KR3ed012) zhùyóu chapters. The two together provide an unusually complete view of Sòng emergency-medical religious practice.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- Wikipedia (zh): 急救仙方.
- Sìkù quánshū reconstruction from Yǒnglè dàdiǎn.
- 急救仙方 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB