Fúshòu Jīngfāng 扶壽精方
Choice Recipes for Supporting Longevity by 吳旻 (Wú Mín, fl. mid-Ming, 明)
About the work
The Fúshòu jīngfāng in 2 juǎn is a mid-Ming practical-medical recipe handbook compiled by Wú Mín 吳旻. The hxwd transmission preserves two reprint prefaces (the Chóngkè Fúshòu jīngfāng xù) that document its circulation history:
- The first reprint preface by Shī Dǔchén 施篤臣 (hào Héngyáng shānrén 恆陽山人, jìnshì), dated 萬曆元年癸酉五月五日 (= summer 1573, the Wànlì year 1). Records the publishing context: a senior official Cáo gōng 曹公 of Shuǐyù 水峪 (a place-name) showed the work to his colleagues at official leisure; one colleague said it was “not particularly secret or marvellous”; Shī Dǔchén replied with the famous yòngyào rú yòngbīng “using drugs is like deploying troops — there is both orthodoxy and irregularity, and the choice depends on application.” Sets out a moral-theological framing: human longevity depends on the fúyǎng 扶養 cultivation of mountain trees by rain-and-dew, and on the cultivation of human bodies by drugs.
- The earlier original preface by Zhào Wénháo 趙文豪 (Chūntáizǐ 春臺子), dated 嘉靖癸丑孟冬 (= winter 1553, the Jiājìng 32 reign-year), signed as Sānguān bīngbèi 三關兵備 (Military Defence Commissioner of the Three Passes) at Hǎibīn 海濱 … Shānxī ānchá sī fùshǐ 山西按察司副使 (Vice-Commissioner of the Shanxi Surveillance Office, charged with the Three Passes military defence). Records the work’s origin: Zhào had been prefect of Huái’ān 淮安 and had established a Shòumín tíng 壽民亭 (“People-Longevity Pavilion”) at the prison, providing medicines for the inmates. On reassignment to Sānguān (the Three Passes military-defence zone, in northern Shanxi), he found neither physicians nor medical books available; he obtained the Fúshòu jīngfāng from a retiree, found its recipes easy and effective, and contributed his salary toward printing 1,000 copies for the troops and civilians of the Three Passes border zone.
Prefaces
The two Chóngkè (reprint) prefaces above are the principal paratexts. No original autograph preface survives.
Abstract
Wú Mín 吳旻 (fl. mid-Ming, precise lifedates and biographical detail unrecorded; not in CBDB) was a mid-Ming physician whose principal contribution is the Fúshòu jīngfāng. The work itself is dated by the 1553 Zhào Wénháo preface (the earliest dated print witness); the original composition likely predates 1553 by some years. The 1573 Shī Dǔchén reprint is the standard textual base for the hxwd recension.
The work’s significance is principally as a witness to mid-Ming military and prison medical patronage. Zhào Wénháo’s preface narrates two distinct institutional applications of the work: (i) the Huái’ān prison medical service (a Ming-era prefectural inmate welfare programme), and (ii) the Three Passes military-defence border-medicine provision. Both are unusual contexts for late-imperial medical-book deployment, and the work’s yìjiǎn (easy and simple) recipes — calibrated for environments without resident physicians — fit those contexts.
The text covers general internal medicine with sections on stroke, paralysis, xūláo deficiency exhaustion, wūzé abnormal sexual function, fùrén gynaecology, xiǎoér paediatrics, and external trauma. The recipes are largely Júfāng and Zhū Zhèn-hēng-derived with mid-Ming clinical adjustments.
Translations and research
- Hé Shíxī 何時希 (coll.). 1990. Fúshòu jīngfāng 扶壽精方 (punctuated edition).
- For Ming-era prison medicine: Bodde, Derk and Clarence Morris. 1973. Law in Imperial China.
- Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §41.3.2.
Other points of interest
Zhào Wénháo’s Shòumín tíng 壽民亭 (“People-Longevity Pavilion”) at the Huái’ān prison — established as an inmate medical-relief station — is one of the better-documented examples of Ming-era prefectural-level public-medical patronage. The Fúshòu jīngfāng served as the dispensing manual for that programme, and its subsequent re-deployment to the Sānguān border zone shows how a single mid-Ming popular-medical text circulated across multiple institutional contexts.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- Wikipedia (zh): 扶壽精方.
- 扶壽精方 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB