Wàizhì Shòushì Fāng 外治壽世方
External-Treatment Formulas for World Longevity by 鄒存淦 (Zōu Cúngàn, hào Lìshēng 儷笙, fl. 1870s, late Qīng); collated and published by 胡增彬 (Hú Zēngbīn, zì Qiānbó 謙伯) of Xīnān 新安, 1877
About the work
A late-Qīng specialised compendium devoted to external-application therapies — wàizhì 外治, treatments applied to the skin or to body-cavities other than by oral ingestion: poultices (fū), plasters (tiē), suppositories, hot-compresses (yùn), washes (xǐ), fumigations (xūn), steam-baths (zhēngyù), and so on, alongside the standard zhēn (acupuncture) and jiǔ (moxibustion). The work explicitly positions itself as a supplement to oral-medication clinical practice, asserting (per the postface) that “tāngyào bùnéng jìnbìng” (oral decoctions cannot exhaust [the range of] disease) — and that elderly patients, infants, post-partum women, and consumptive patients in particular cannot tolerate purgative oral medications, so that external methods are essential to their treatment.
Prefaces
Postface (bá) by Hú Zēngbīn 胡增彬, zì Qiānbó 謙伯, of Xīnān 新安 (the old name of Huīzhōu prefecture, Anhui), Guāngxù 3 Tiānzhōngjié = Duānwǔ Festival (5th lunar month, 5th day) 1877.
“The Wàizhì shòushì fāng — chūbiān (first compilation) in 4 juǎn — is the manuscript hand-collected by my friend Mr. Zōu Lìshēng 鄒儷笙 [= Zōu Cúngàn], who entrusted to me the collation. Among the methods of external treatment, zhēnjiǔ (acupuncture-and-moxibustion) is the most ancient. But these are not usable for one who has not deeply read the Língshū and is not thoroughly versed in the channel-network. So the physicians of the world, even those who claim to imitate Zhòngjǐng, in reality have not penetrated to Zhòngjǐng’s inner chamber: they simply abandon zhēnjiǔ and know only to treat by tāngyè (oral decoctions). — But the old and the young dislike taking medicine to a great extent: the one because of exhausted jīngxuè (essence-and-blood), the other because of zàngfǔ (organ-and-bowel) tenderness. Both cannot bear gōngfá (attacking-purging). Post-partum women and consumptives are even more difficult to medicate. — The ancient formulas had therefore the yùn, yù, xūn, zhēng (hot-compress, bath, fumigation, steam) methods, by which to remedy the limitations of [oral-medicine] technique. The various worthies of the Táng and Sòng all attended to this carefully; and we still have the saying that tāngyào cannot exhaust disease. Then beyond zhēnjiǔ, if not by yùn / yù / xūn / zhēng methods — by what shall one accomplish the cure?
“The compilation of this volume is suitable to remote villages where physicians are few, and is indeed not a qiēyào shū (most-essential book) of the Apricot Grove [= medical world].”
Abstract
A precisely-dated 1877 (Guāngxù 3) external-medicine compendium by Zōu Cúngàn (hào Lìshēng 儷笙). The work is in the late-Qīng zhuānmén (specialised) clinical-formulary genre: an entire compilation devoted to one of the standard sub-disciplines of late-Imperial medicine — in this case, the external-application sub-discipline, which had a substantial pedigree in earlier Chinese medicine (the Wàitái mìyào, the Shèngjì zǒnglù, and so on, all preserve substantial external-application sections) but had not previously been assembled as a stand-alone compendium.
The postface-writer Hú Zēngbīn is the collator and publisher; he was a friend of Zōu’s and apparently a Xīnān (Huīzhōu) literatus of the late nineteenth century. The work was substantively important to late-Qīng clinical popular pharmacology: it preserved a corpus of wàizhì methods — fumigations for paediatric eruptive fevers, steam-baths for post-partum tetany, hot-compresses for zǐgōng zhèng (uterine syndromes), and many others — that the standard oral-formularies of the period had not consolidated. A chūbiān (first compilation) is signalled in the title, implying a planned subsequent series of additional volumes.
The work was widely reprinted in the late Qīng and early Republic and is the principal late-Imperial reference for wàizhì methodology. Modern annotated editions: Wàizhì shòushì fāng, in the Zhōngyī zhìfǎ jīngdiǎn xìliè (Beijing, various publishers, late 20th c.).
Translations and research
- Wàizhì shòushì fāng, modern punctuated edition: Rénmín wèishēng chūbǎnshè, Beijing, with annotation.
- For the wàizhì tradition see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine (Eastland, 2007), and Bian, He. Know Your Remedies (Princeton, 2020).
Other points of interest
The postface’s polemic against contemporary physicians who “claim to imitate Zhòngjǐng” but in fact know only oral-decoction therapy — and have entirely abandoned acupuncture-and-moxibustion — is itself an interesting datum on the late-Qīng narrowing of clinical practice away from the diverse classical repertoire. By the late nineteenth century, the dominant urban clinical mode was clearly oral-decoction-only; acupuncture had become a separate specialty practiced by a smaller subset of physicians; and wàizhì methods were almost forgotten. The Wàizhì shòushì fāng is therefore a deliberate recovery project.
Links
- See 鄒存淦 and 胡增彬.
- 外治壽世方 (jicheng.tw)
- Kanseki DB