Jíjiù Biànfāng 急救便方
A Handy Manual for Emergency Rescue anonymous compilation, Qīng dynasty
About the work
A late-Qīng anonymous popular emergency-medicine handbook of the kind that proliferated in late Imperial and early Republican-period morally-improving print culture — assembling the standard formulas and physical-rescue protocols for immediate, lay-administered intervention in the most common forms of acute distress (hanging, drowning, choking, strangulation, snake- and dog-bite, accidental poisoning, sunstroke, sudden fits, lightning-strike, fall-from-height, infant suffocation, post-partum haemorrhage, and so on). The work has no named author and no preface in the digital edition; the catalog entry gives the author-field blank.
Prefaces
The KR source KR3ed103_000.txt opens directly with the Jiù zìyì liángfāng 救自縊良方 (“Good Formulas for Rescuing the Self-Hanged”) and has no preface or table of contents preserved in the digital text.
Abstract
A representative example of the late-Qīng popular emergency-formulary genre — the printed-and-redistributed shànshū 善書 (“morality book”) branch of medical literature, where the work is intended to be printed and freely distributed by Buddhist or Confucian charitable societies (the shàntǎng 善堂 of JiāngNán prefectures) to the population at large. The texts of this genre are characteristically anonymous, the formulas drawn from many standard formularies but reformatted into a flat alphabetical-by-syndrome ordering for layman consultation, and the rescue-protocols are highly directive and procedural — the hanging-rescue section, for example, instructs the rescuer step-by-step on how to suspend the victim’s head and chest, massage the limbs, plug the rectum to prevent qì-escape, force breath into the mouth and ears, and so on.
The work survives in many printings of the late nineteenth century, all anonymous, with substantial textual variation. The KR text is one such recension; without internal date-evidence or named author, the dating cannot be tightened beyond the wide late-Qīng bracket. Cognate works in the same emergency-rescue genre — also typically with overlapping content — include KR3ed108 Yànfāng xīn biān (Bào Xiāngáo’s 1846 work, by contrast a named author) and KR3ed109 Jǐshì shényàn liángfāng (anonymous Qīng).
The methods given are a mixture of (i) Chinese clinical formulas (decoctions of gāncǎo, guìzhī, gānjiāng; powders of xìxīn and zàojiá); (ii) moxibustion of standard rescue-points (yǒngquán 湧泉, rénzhōng 人中, bǎihuì 百會); (iii) manipulation (chest-pumping, limb-flexing, sternal-massage — anticipating modern CPR); (iv) folk-charm materials (live goose-beak in the mouth, cockerel-blood from the comb, white-mole-blood) — a syncretism characteristic of the shànshū genre.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located on this specific anonymous recension. The genre as a whole is treated in:
- Mark Halperin, Out of the Cloister: Literati Perspectives on Buddhism in Sung China, 960–1279 — on the shàn-shū / charity-publishing tradition.
- Catherine Despeux, “Édition et autorité chez les médecins de l’époque Ming,” in T’oung Pao.
Links
- Cognate Qīng anonymous emergency-formularies: KR3ed108, KR3ed109.
- 急救便方 (jicheng.tw)
- Kanseki DB