Jīnshì Ménzhěn Fāng’àn 金氏門診方案
The Jīn-Family Outpatient Case-Records by 金子久 (Jīn Zǐjiǔ = Jīn Bǎozhī, 1870–1921, late Qīng / early Republican)
About the work
The Jīnshì ménzhěn fāng’àn is a 4-juǎn (in some editions 6-juǎn) collection of the outpatient case-records of Jīn Zǐjiǔ 金子久 (1870–1921), the leading Tóngxiāng 桐鄉 / Húzhōu 湖州 physician of the late-Qīng-early-Republican period. The work preserves about a thousand clinical cases from Jīn’s bustling Húzhōu practice in approximately the form in which they were originally written — a short case-narrative (patient name, age, presenting complaint, channel/organ diagnosis, prognostic comment) followed by the formula, sometimes followed by a follow-up entry recording the response and the modified prescription.
Prefaces
The source begins immediately with the first case (顧左二十六歲久遺傷腎 “Patient Gù, 26 sui, chronic seminal emission injuring the kidney”). No separate dated preface is present in the KR transmission.
Abstract
Jīn Zǐjiǔ’s clinical style is in the late Wúzhōng (Sūzhōu) tradition, with a particularly clear yīn-fluid orientation: many of his cases foreground yīn-deficiency with xūhuǒ (deficient fire) as the pathomechanism, and his prescribing relies heavily on Èrzhì wán drugs (nǚzhēnzǐ 女貞子, hànlián 旱蓮草, jīnyīn cǎo), Sìwù base for blood-deficiency, Zhúrú / Chuānbèi / Pípá yè for pòhuǒ (lung-fire), and Mǔlì / Lónggǔ for yángfú (yang-floating). The cases also show his characteristic use of Héshǒuwū téng 何首烏藤 (poly-gonum-vine, yèjiāoténg) as a sleep-and-blood drug, a Mènghé / Húzhōu signature.
The SūzhōuHángzhōu cluster of late-Qīng physicians — Mǎ Péizhī 馬培之 in Mènghé, Fèi Bóxióng 費伯雄 in Wújìn, Jīn Zǐjiǔ in Tóngxiāng, Wáng Yùzī 王畬子 in Hángzhōu, Yú Lìchū 余聽鴻 in Chángshú — collectively constitute the late-Qīng warm-disease orthodoxy that Dīng Gānrén 丁甘仁 and the Shanghai Chinese Medicine School would inherit and institutionalise in 1916.
The composition window: Jīn’s working practice ran from c. 1895 to his death in 1921. The case-records as transmitted appear to span this entire period and were assembled by his disciples after his death.
Translations and research
- Jīn Zǐjiǔ yīān 金子久醫案 / Jīn-shì mén-zhěn fāng’àn 金氏門診方案 (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 discusses the late-Qīng Wú-zhōng / Mèng-hé constellation of which Jīn Zǐjiǔ is a representative figure.
- No major Western-language monograph dedicated to this work specifically.
Other points of interest
Jīn’s recurrent diagnostic phrase “kuǎn lí shǎo jiāo” 坎離少交 (“the kǎn (water/kidney) and lí (fire/heart) hardly interact”) is a particularly elegant statement of the xīnshèn (heart-kidney) communication-failure pathomechanism that he diagnoses across a wide range of presenting complaints (insomnia, seminal emission, chronic cough, palpitations). The phrase becomes a hallmark of the Jīn-school clinical idiom.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- Wikipedia (zh) 金子久
- 金氏門診方案 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB