Yàozhì Tōngyì 藥治通義
General Principles of Drug Therapy by 丹波元堅 (Tamba no Motokata 丹波元堅, Dānbō Yuánjiān, 1795–1857; late Edo, Japan)
About the work
A 12-juǎn philological-pharmacological treatise that is among Tamba no Motokata’s most-cited later works, surveying the entire historical literature on drug therapy as a clinical discipline: dosing, contraindications, drug-food interactions, decoction-making, post-medication regimen, drug-toxicity reversal, jūnchénzuǒshǐ (君臣佐使 “sovereign-and-minister”) combinatorics, the relation of fāng (formula) to yào (substance), and the philosophical question of whether to lean toward warming-tonification or cooling-purgation. The work compiles thousands of citations from the entire Chinese medical bibliography, from the Sùwèn through the Wàitái and Qiānjīn, the Sòng Shèngjì zǒnglù and Shènghuì fāng, the JīnYuán sìjiā, the Míng masters (Lǐ Shízhēn, Miù Xīyōng, Lǐ Niànmó, Zhāng Jièbīn, Xuē Jǐ), through to the late-Qīng Wēnbìng masters and the Edo Japanese kanpō scholars (the Tamba house, the kohōha 古方派 of Yoshimasu Tōdō, etc.). Each topic is presented as a léishū 類書 mosaic of source-quotations followed by Motokata’s editorial ànyǔ (按語) at the end.
Prefaces
The KR source begins directly with juǎn 1 (Yòngyào wù piānzhí 用藥勿偏執, “On Not Holding to One Extreme in Drug Use”) and has no front-matter preface in the digital edition; the woodblock editions normally carry a Tianpao-era Tenpō 天保 / Kaei 嘉永 self-preface and the publication colophons of the Edo seizōdō publishing houses.
Abstract
The work is firmly post-1839 and probably composed during the 1840s, judging from its citation of Motokata’s own Sùwèn shào shí of 1846 and from cross-references to his Zá bìng guǎng yào of 1853. It belongs to the late phase of his career and is one of the principal philological pharmacology works of Edo kanpō. Motokata’s family pedigree — son of 丹波元簡 (Tamba no Mototane, 1755–1810) and younger brother of 丹波元胤 (Tamba no Motoin) — places him at the centre of the Igaku-kan 醫學館 textual-critical school which dominated Edo medical philology from the 1790s to the 1850s.
The book’s structural argument is the Tamba house position that polemical adherence to a single JīnYuán sìjiā doctrine (Liú Wánsù’s cooling, Lǐ Dōngyuán’s warming-tonification, Zhū Dānxī’s yīn-supplementation, etc.) is a doctrinal blind spot, and that the clinician must orient himself by the case at hand (寒熱虛實 vs. doctrinal preference). The opening fascicle assembles Yú Shǒuyuē 俞守約, Xǔ Shūwēi, Zhāng Yǐnān 張隱菴, Xǔ Lǔzhāi 許魯齋 (the Yuán-dynasty Confucian’s letter to Liáng Kuānfù on medicine) and Miù Xīyōng etc. into a sustained argument against fixed-school partisanship — a position consistent with the later Edo Igaku-kan eclectic stance against both kohōha fundamentalism and one-sided gosei-ha 後世派 doctrine.
The work is preserved in the Edo woodblock printing (a few extant copies in Japanese collections, e.g. the Cabinet Library 内閣文庫) and was reprinted in modern times by the Zhōngguó zhōngyīyào chūbǎnshè 中國中醫藥出版社 (Beijing, 2009, in the Hǎiwài Huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書 series).
Translations and research
- Yàozhì tōngyì, modern punctuated edition, in Hǎi-wài Huí-guī Zhōngyī shàn-běn gǔ-jí cóng-shū 海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書, Beijing: Zhōng-guó zhōngyīyào chū-bǎn-shè, 2009.
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠, various articles on Tamba bibliography in Nihon ishigaku zasshi 日本醫史學雜誌.
- Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011) — for context on the doctrinal sì-jiā debates that Motokata addresses.
Links
- See 丹波元堅 for biography and other works of the author.
- 藥治通義 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB