奇方類編

Qífāng Lèibiān 奇方類編

Categorically Arranged Extraordinary Formulas by 吳世昌 (Wú Shìchāng, fl. early Qīng); with an appendix Qíjí fāng 奇疾方 (“Formulas for Extraordinary Diseases”) by 王遠 (Wáng Yuǎn, fl. 1718)

About the work

A Qīng-period specialised formulary devoted to “extraordinary” (奇 qí) conditions — clinical presentations that fall outside the standard Shānghán / Wēnbìng / SòngYuánMíng formulary repertoire and that thus require unusual prescriptions. The work is in 2 juǎn, divided into 27 mén (categories) covering the cephalic region, hair, sense-organs, throat, chest, abdomen, gynaecology, paediatrics, dermatology, surgery, emergency rescue, and miscellaneous. It contains 800+ formulas, drawn from sources including the Běncǎo gāngmù (Lǐ Shízhēn), the Pǔjì fāng, the Wàitái mìyào, and a range of SòngMíng compendia, with strong representation of rare-substance and single-case recipes of the kind that the standard formularies do not transmit. An appendix titled Qíjí fāng 奇疾方 (“Formulas for Extraordinary Diseases”) by Wáng Yuǎn 王遠 of Zhègāo 柘皋 (Anhui) preserves a parallel collection of yìjí guàizhèng (strange-ailment) formulas.

Prefaces

The KR source KR3ed104_000.txt opens with the Wáng Yuǎn preface for the appendix Qíjí fāng:

“I am not a physician, but I love to copy out formularies. I once collected the simple-and-easy recipes of the ancient formularies, internal-and-external each forming a bundle, and was about to send them to the engravers. My younger brother Suì stopped me, saying: ‘To hold a formula and apply medicine by it is like fixing the [tuning-]peg and yet playing the pípa — people differ in strength/weakness and xū / shí, and without pulse-diagnosis there is no way to discern the syndrome. The ancient formulas are not unrefined, but if their use violates the Dào, they will mislead and harm. — So I did not proceed.

“One day at the Yìhé ferry-head I saw a woman whose eyes were hanging out of their sockets. I was full of compassion. I asked the physicians, but all were blank-faced and could not answer. Later I was reading the Běncǎo gāngmù and saw that Xià Zǐyì’s 夏子益 Qíjí fāng had a formula for this — but by then that woman had long been dead. I sighed: had I had this formula earlier and given it to her, who knows but that she might have lived? On this account I gathered up the qíjí guàizhèng (extraordinary illness and strange symptoms) — some seen in books, some heard from visitors’ conversations — and entered them all. Those from the Běncǎo are most numerous; but the Běncǎo is not a rare book, and the various formulas scattered under each substance with no easy way to search through the vast volumes — so I extracted them for convenience of consultation.”

The preface is signed zhùyǒng yānmào qiěyuè jìwàng Zhègāo yúshǐ Wáng Yuǎn shí 著壅閹茂且月既望柘皋漁史王遠識 — using the gānzhī cyclical-name notation: zhùyǒng = wù, yānmào = xū, hence year wùxū 戊戌 = 1718 (next wùxū in 1778 falls outside Wú Shìchāng’s career). Qiěyuè 且月 = 6th lunar month; jìwàng = 16th day. So the preface is precisely datable to late summer of 1718 at Zhègāo 柘皋 (Cháohú, Anhui).

Abstract

The Qífāng lèibiān is a representative of the early-Qīng specialised-formulary genre that flowered in the Kāngxī era. The work is firmly datable to 1717–1722 by the Wáng Yuǎn preface (1718). Wú Shìchāng was a Qīng physician of moderate scholarly standing whose name does not appear in CBDB; biographical detail is largely confined to what can be inferred from the work’s preface and from contemporaneous catalogue references in the Sìkù quánshū zǒngmù family-context literature.

The work is best understood as two distinct compilations bound together:

1. Wú Shìchāng’s Qífāng lèibiān proper — 27 categories, 800+ formulas, organised by anatomical / clinical region.
2. Wáng Yuǎn’s Qíjí fāng appendix — drawing on the Běncǎo gāngmù’s formula-traces (and citing the Yuán-period Xià Zǐyì Qíjí fāng as direct precedent) to assemble a parallel compendium of bizarre-symptom recipes.

Wáng’s preface is the earlier dated component (1718) and provides the firm chronological anchor; Wú’s portion is approximately contemporaneous. The work circulated widely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the modern critical edition is by the Zhōngyīgǔjí publishing house, Beijing, 2004.

Translations and research

• Qífāng lèibiān, modern critical edition: Beijing: Zhōngyī gǔjí chūbǎnshè 中醫古籍出版社, 2004.
• The Yuán-period precedent Qíjí fāng 奇疾方 of Xià Zǐyì (Xià Dé) 夏德, zì Zǐyì 子益, is treated in the Sìkù preface tradition; see also Lǐ Shízhēn Běncǎo gāngmù (1593), which preserves the major Xià Zǐyì quotations.

Other points of interest

The Wáng Yuǎn preface preserves a memorable anecdote that is one of the most-cited motivations in Qīng popular-medical print culture: the unnamed woman at the Yìhé ferry whose eyeballs had emerged from their sockets, and Wáng’s subsequent discovery that the Běncǎo preserved a formula for the condition — but too late. The anecdote works as a moral-charity justification for the publication of recipes that would otherwise remain locked away in the encyclopedic vastness of the Gāngmù.

Links

• Lǐ Shízhēn Běncǎo gāngmù (1593) — the principal source of the Qíjí fāng appendix.
• See 吳世昌 and 王遠.
• 奇方類編 (jicheng.tw)
• Kanseki DB