Tàiyīyuàn Mìcáng Gāo Dān Wán Sǎn Fāngjì 太醫院秘藏膏丹丸散方劑
The Imperial Medical Academy’s Privately-Held Recipes for Plasters, Elixirs, Pills and Powders compiled by the Tàiyīyuàn 太醫院 (Imperial Medical Academy, 清)
About the work
The Tàiyīyuàn mìcáng gāo dān wán sǎn fāngjì is a four-juǎn palace formulary preserving recipes for plasters (gāo 膏), elixirs (dān 丹), pills (wán 丸), and powders (sǎn 散) drawn from the working stock of the Qīng Imperial Medical Academy. The collection covers internal medicine, gynaecology, paediatrics, and external/wound medicine, with each formula given as a list of constituent drugs followed by its proper zhìfǎ (compounding method) and primary indications. The work is a typical gōngtíng (palace) formulary in genre: comprehensive, prescription-only, with no exegesis of underlying medical theory.
Prefaces
No dated authorial preface is preserved. The work is anonymous-institutional in character: the Tàiyīyuàn itself, not any single physician, stands as compiler.
Abstract
Palace formularies of this kind circulated within and around the Qīng court throughout the dynasty. The Imperial Medical Academy maintained working archives of compounded preparations that were literally in the cabinet of the palace pharmacy; periodically these were copied and circulated to relatives, banner-house households, and occasionally to elite physicians outside the palace. Many such manuscripts surfaced in the late Qīng and early Republic when palace officials moved their personal libraries and the Forbidden City began (after 1911) to disgorge its archive. The present compilation appears to derive from one such late-Qīng manuscript line; the editio princeps in print is mid-Republican (Shanghai, 1930s).
Dating the content is harder than dating the compilation. Several of the formulas — Shèngjīn dān 勝金丹, Qīzhì xiāngfù wán 七制香附丸, Tàipíng wán 太平丸, Zīshēng wán 資生丸, Tiānwáng bǔxīn dān 天王補心丹, Wǔfú huàdú dān 五福化毒丹 — are well known from Míng or pre-Míng formularies and were standard in palace use. Others reflect Qīng innovations. The notBefore/notAfter are accordingly set to the broad span of the Qīng (1644–1911) as a terminus a quo/terminus ad quem for the working stock, with the printed editio princeps falling in the 1930s.
Translations and research
- Chén Kěji 陳可冀 et al. Cí-Xī Guāng-xù yī fāng xuǎn yì 慈禧光緒醫方選議 (Beijing: Zhōnghuá shūjú, 1981; expanded eds. thereafter). The principal Chinese-language study of late-Qing palace medicine, drawing in part on the same Tàiyīyuàn working stock.
- No substantial Western-language monograph devoted specifically to this work.
Other points of interest
The plurality of Tàiyīyuàn palace-formulary titles in circulation under similar names (Tàiyīyuàn jīngyàn fāng 太醫院經驗方, Yùyàoyuàn fāng 御藥院方 KR3ed025, Tàiyīyuàn mìcáng …) and the lack of a fixed compiler complicates philology but reflects the institutional character of palace medicine: the recipes belong to the bureau, not to any one author.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- 太醫院秘藏膏丹丸散方劑 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB