Héhuǎn Yífēng 和緩遺風
The Lingering Style of [Yī] Hé and [Yī] Huǎn by 馬培之 (Mǎ Péizhī, 1820–1903, leader of the late-Qīng Mènghé 孟河 school)
About the work
The Héhuǎn yífēng is a 2-juǎn compilation of Mǎ Péizhī’s clinical case-records from his outpatient practice and from his summons-treatment of high-ranking patients (including the 1880 Beijing palace consultation for the Empress Dowager). The title invokes the two legendary physicians of the Zuǒzhuàn — Yī Hé 醫和 and Yī Huǎn 醫緩 of pre-Qín Qín 秦 — as the ancestral exemplars of cautious, principled, unhurried clinical practice, of which Mǎ’s work is presented as the “lingering style” (yífēng 遺風).
Prefaces
The source begins directly with the first case (上海沈賡生壬子年首方 — “Shànghǎi Shěn Gēngshēng, first formula of the rénzǐ year”). The rénzǐ in question is most likely 1852 (Mǎ would have been 32 sui) since Mǎ’s working life ran 1840s–1900s. There is no separate dated preface in the KR transmission.
Abstract
The work is a clinical record, not a doctrinal treatise. Cases are arranged in roughly chronological order from the 1850s through the late 19th century, each presented as a brief diagnostic narrative followed by the prescription. Mǎ’s clinical style is conspicuously consistent: a syndrome-based diagnosis grounded in zàngfǔ organ-channel theory, supplemented by selective use of wēnbìng concepts; formulas built from Sìjūnzǐ, Sìwù, and Xiāoyáo bases with multiple flexible jiājiǎn; gentle warming-and-supplementing prescribing with explicit attention to liúzhì (residual pathology) and to the patient’s recovery-trajectory after the acute episode resolves.
The 1880 Beijing summons is the great event of Mǎ’s career: he was one of a panel of leading physicians (including Lì Dégāo 李德高 and others) called to consult on the illness of the Empress Dowager Cíxǐ. His memorial-style consultation records from that year are partly preserved in the present work. The work as a whole spans Mǎ’s working life from c. 1852 to his retirement c. 1900; the terminus a quo is conservatively 1880 (the year of Mǎ’s nationwide reputation) and the terminus ad quem his death in 1903.
The work is a primary source for the Mènghé clinical synthesis that — through Mǎ’s student Dīng Sōngxī 丁松溪 and his student’s student Dīng Gānrén 丁甘仁 — became the orthodoxy of early-20th-century Shanghai medicine and, via Dīng Gānrén’s school, of post-1949 institutionalised Chinese medicine.
Translations and research
- Mǎ Péizhī yī-shū 馬培之醫書 / Mǎ Péizhī yīxué quánshū 馬培之醫學全書 (modern punctuated editions: Beijing: Zhōngguó Zhōngyīyào chūbǎnshè, 1999, and others).
- Volker Scheid. Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland Press, 2007). Chapter 6 is devoted to the 19th-century Mèng-hé school and to Mǎ Péizhī specifically.
- Scheid, Volker. “The Mèng-hé Medical Lineage in History: Knowing the Past and Recovering Sinitic Identity in Modern Chinese Medicine.” In Reform, Modernity, and Mèng-hé Medicine (Manchester: Routledge, 2007).
Other points of interest
The invocation of Yī Hé and Yī Huǎn in the title is a deliberate cultural-political gesture: Mǎ is positioning the Mènghé tradition as inheritor of the most ancient and authoritative pre-classical Chinese medical lineage, predating even Zhāng Zhòngjǐng. The Zuǒzhuàn episodes in which Yī Huǎn diagnoses incurable disease in Lord Píng of Jìn and Yī Hé articulates the yīnyáng / liùqì doctrine are foundational set-pieces in Chinese medical historiography, and Mǎ’s adoption of them as ancestor-figures for his own clinical style is a powerful claim of lineal authority.
Links
- Wikidata Q67139853 (Héhuǎn yífēng) — placeholder; verify.
- Wikipedia (zh) 馬培之
- 和緩遺風 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB