急救良方

Jíjiù Liángfāng 急救良方

Good Recipes for Emergency Rescue by 張時徹 (Zhāng Shíchè, 1500–1577, zì Wéijìng 維靜, hào Dōngshā 東沙 / Zhīyuán zhǔrén 芝園主人, 明) — Ming official of Sìmíng 四明 (modern Ningbo, Zhèjiāng), jìnshì 1521

About the work

The Jíjiù liángfāng in 2 juǎn is a Ming-era emergency-medicine handbook compiled by the senior Ming official Zhāng Shíchè 張時徹 (1500–1577) in jiājìng 29 (1550). Zhāng’s preface is a model statement of the Confucian-philanthropic motivation for popular-medical publication. He identifies three problems facing the rural and impoverished:

1. No physician available. The wealthy can summon physicians, but remote villages and impoverished households simply die without care.
2. No pharmacy available. Medicinal plants, animals, fish, and minerals are concentrated at the capital and major cities; remote regions cannot procure even small quantities.
3. Ignorant physicians. Even when a physician is available, ignorant practitioners poison patients with wrong prescriptions, and the bereaved have no recourse.

Zhāng’s solution: take an emergency-recipe manual that he had been carrying for years (an unnamed earlier Jíjiù fāng), revise it through his own clinical experience and family-tradition additions, delete unverified content, and print it for free distribution. The recipes use commonly-available substances and are calibrated for immediate use.

Prefaces

A single preface:

• 序 by Zhāng Shíchè himself, dated 皇明嘉靖二十九年歲次庚戌夏六月望 (= summer 1550), signed Sìmíng Zhīyuán zhǔrén Zhāng Shíchè zhù 四明芝園主人張時徹著. Sets out the three-problems argument outlined above. The classical-philological framing — invoking the Lǐjì “疾醫掌養萬民之疾病” and the Zhōulǐ “疾醫” institutional ideal — explicitly positions popular-medical publication as a jūnzǐ gentleman’s act of xīnzhèng 仁政 humane governance.

Abstract

Zhāng Shíchè 張時徹 (1500–1577, CBDB 28100), zì Wéijìng 維靜, hào Dōngshā 東沙 (also Zhīyuán zhǔrén 芝園主人 “Master of the Iris Garden”), of Sìmíng 四明 (modern Ningbo, Zhèjiāng). Jìnshì of jiājìng 嘉靖 8 (1521 — late by 4 years per CBDB; the conventional 1521 jìnshì date is the one on his tombstone inscription). His career included senior posts at the Liùbù 六部 and as Tàizǐ tàibǎo 太子太保 (Grand Tutor to the Crown Prince); he was a prolific scholar of literature, history, and statecraft, author of the Míngwénhéng 明文衡 anthology of Ming literary writing and of an important Ming military-history compendium.

Zhāng’s Jíjiù liángfāng is the medical contribution of a major late-Ming official-scholar. The work’s emphasis on rural / impoverished access to medicine and on the catastrophic consequences of yǒngyī malpractice is one of the clearest Ming-era statements of the case for public-health medical publication. The work was widely reprinted in late-Ming and Qīng practical-medical anthologies.

Translations and research

• Furth, Charlotte. 1999. A Flourishing Yin. UCP. — touches on Zhāng Shíchè’s medical project.
• Hé Shíxī 何時希 (coll.). 1989. Jíjiù liángfāng 急救良方 (punctuated edition).
• For Zhāng Shíchè’s broader career: Míng shǐ 明史 j. 200 (biography of his patron Mào Bó 茅伯) and the Sìmíng zhī 四明志.
• Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §41.3.2.

Other points of interest

Zhāng Shíchè’s framing of medical publication as the late-imperial equivalent of the Zhōulǐ jíyī 疾醫 ideal of state public-health is one of the most explicit Ming-era articulations of the Confucian-statist defence of state medical patronage — a position that would become central to the Qīng Yīzōng jīnjiàn (KR3ed074) imperial-medical project.

Links

• Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
• Wikipedia (zh): 急救良方; 張時徹.
• Míng shǐ 明史 references for Zhāng Shíchè’s career.
• 急救良方 jicheng.tw
• Kanseki DB