Yìngjí Liángfāng 應急良方
Good Formulas for Emergency Response by 胡文煥 (Hú Wénhuàn, hào Quánān 全菴, fl. late Wànlì era, Míng; Qiántáng 錢唐 [Hángzhōu])
About the work
A late-Míng emergency-formulary in 1 juǎn by Hú Wénhuàn 胡文煥, the prolific Wàn-lì-era Hángzhōu publisher-compiler whose Gézhì cóngshū 格致叢書 and other cóngshū publications were among the most influential late-Míng léishū (encyclopedia) productions. The Yìngjí liángfāng is one of Hú’s many specialised compilations and is in the standard emergency-formulary mode: arranged by clinical condition (tōngyòng general / jūnluànshā cholera-and-twisting-pain / yángtuō yang-collapse / zìhàn spontaneous sweating / tánsòu cough-and-phlegm / tǔxiě bíniù blood-vomit-and-nosebleed / báizhuó dàixià leucorrhoea / etc.), each entry giving formulas in concise form.
Prefaces
The KR source KR3ed137_000.txt opens directly with the Tōngyòng (general-use) section and lacks a standalone front-matter preface in the digital text. The work is normally found bound within Hú’s larger cóngshū productions; the standalone version often lacks separately-paginated front matter.
Abstract
A representative example of Hú Wénhuàn’s late-Míng practical-encyclopedic compilations. Hú (zì De-yī 德一, hào Quánān 全菴) was a major Hángzhōu publisher of the Wànlì era who specialised in producing accessible popular-knowledge editions of large bodies of inherited literature. His Gézhì cóngshū 格致叢書 (early 1600s) included over 300 separately-titled works on a vast range of subjects (medicine, divination, geography, calligraphy, military strategy, biographical compilation, animal-and-plant lore, etc.), making it one of the principal vehicles for popular-knowledge dissemination in late-Míng China.
The Yìngjí liángfāng belongs to Hú’s medical sub-publication output, which also includes the Wànyòng zhèngzōng 萬用正宗, the Yángshēng dǎoyǐn fǎ 養生導引法, and several specialised formulary excerpts. The work’s structural simplicity — flat alphabetical-by-syndrome ordering, each entry one or two recipes only — reflects its intended use as a lay-readership jíjiù shǒucè (emergency-rescue handbook).
The dating cannot be tightened beyond Hú’s known active period (1590s–1610s); the work was probably compiled in the same general window as the Gézhì cóngshū major publications (early 1600s).
Translations and research
- For Hú Wénhuàn’s publishing career see: Lucille Chia, Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Fujian (11th–17th Centuries) (Harvard, 2002), and Brokaw, Cynthia, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Harvard, 2007).
- The Yìngjí liángfāng itself has not received separate scholarly treatment.
Links
- See 胡文煥 for biography and Hú’s other works in the corpus.
- Cognate works of the late-Míng emergency-formulary genre: the Wànyòng zhèngzōng and other Wànlì léishū.
- 應急良方 (jicheng.tw)
- Kanseki DB