Yīfāng Jiǎnyì 醫方簡義
Concise Meanings of Medical Formulas by 王清源 (Wáng Qīngyuán, zì Fùyuán 馥原, fl. mid-late 19th c., 清)
About the work
The Yīfāng jiǎnyì in 6 juǎn is a major late-Qīng analytical formulary by Wáng Qīngyuán of Shānyīn 山陰 (modern Shàoxīng 紹興). It is the fruit of “more than twenty years of labour” (積二十餘年之力) of careful selection, evaluation, and annotation of post-classical formulas, with explicit grounding in Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s clinical reasoning and a programmatic refusal of arbitrary partisanship.
Prefaces
The work carries a thoughtful preface (preserved at the head of the source) by a senior contemporary, key passages:
- Citing Chéngzǐ 程子: “Even an officer of the lowest rank, if his heart is set on benefitting the world, can do good wherever he goes.” The preface invokes Lù Xuāngōng 陸宣公 (Lù Zhì 陸贄 of the Táng) as the model of the literatus who, in retirement, transcribed secret recipes by his own hand, saying “this too is one of the arts of saving people.”
- The deep difficulty of practical medicine. Medicine appears simple (“drugs are dispensed by physicians, recipes are transmitted from the ancients”) but is in fact extraordinarily difficult. To arbitrarily increase or decrease doses is one error; to rely blindly on old recipes is another. Diseases have ten thousand variations, drugs have ten thousand actions; the xiāngxū / xiāngshǐ / xiāngwèi / xiāngè / xiāngfǎn / xiāngshā (compatibilities and incompatibilities) must each be heeded; yīnshí zhìyí (adapting to circumstance) is the way of true practice.
- The work of Wáng Fùyuán. Twenty years of patient labour, weighing each formula in zhū and liǎng (the smallest weight-units), setting aside personal opinion, with particular devotion to Zhāng Zhòngjǐng. “Zhòngjǐng has no other secret: he sees the principle through, his arguments are even, his teaching brings results without partisanship.”
- The preface ends by praising the work as a corrective to the partisan-school medicine of the day and warning against the miù zhǒng liúchuán “spreading of bad seed” that occurs when half-baked theories are mistaken for received tradition.
Abstract
Wáng Qīngyuán’s project is methodologically conservative: a careful, classically grounded selection of the post-Sòng formulary corpus, with explicit attention to xīxí (study and tradition) and a refusal of the partisan-school polemics that characterized much late-Qīng medical writing. The work is in 6 juǎn of roughly equal weight, covering internal medicine, gynaecology, paediatrics, external medicine, ulcers, and emergencies. The composition window — twenty years of labour ending in some year shortly before printing — places the work in the post-Tàipíng late-Qīng (c. 1860–1885); we set the notBefore to 1860 and notAfter to 1885.
The work was printed at Shànghǎi and saw wide reprinting in late-Qīng and Republican formulary collectanea.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located.
The work survives in late-Qing and Republican-era Chinese reprints, and is included in the Mìng-yī fāng-shū dà-chéng 名醫方書大成 collectaneum.
Other points of interest
The work’s prefatial invocation of Lù Xuāngōng 陸宣公 (Lù Zhì 陸贄) as the literatus-physician ancestor-figure is unusual and culturally pointed. Lù Zhì, the Táng zhuàngyuán and chief minister exiled to Zhōngzhōu, copied secret medical recipes during his retirement and saw this as a form of jìshì (benefitting the world) consistent with Confucian service. The invocation places Wáng’s project in the lineage of the Confucian retired-statesman as humane physician, a powerful model of late-imperial literatus-medical identity.
Links
- Wikidata: no dedicated entry.
- 醫方簡義 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB