Tuīná juéwēi 推拿抉微
Probing the Subtleties of Pediatric Massage by 塗蔚生 Tú Wèishēng (撰)
About the work
A four-juan early-Republican pediatric tuīná (massage-therapy) manual by Tú Wèishēng 塗蔚生 of Xìnyáng 信陽 (Henan), self-prefaced in Mínguó 17 = 1928 (wùchén 戊辰 6th month, 20th day) and printed at his Kāifēng 汴垣 medical office. The work synthesizes and corrects the three principal late-Míng and Qīng tuīná monographs that Tú names in his self-preface as the field’s authoritative-but-insufficient ancestors: 夏禹鑄 Xià Yǔzhù, Yòukē tiějìng 幼科鐵鏡 (KR3ee042); 陳紫山 Chén Zǐshān (= 陳氏), Tuīná guǎngyì 推拿廣意 (KR3ee043); and 夏英白 Xià Yīngbái, Bǎochì tuīná 保赤推拿. Tú’s editorial program (preserved in KR3ee053_000.txt) is explicit: he adopts Xià Yīngbái’s tuīná technique as the technical core (“its method is simple and clear, its art precise and exact”) but supplies the diagnostic and pharmacotherapeutic apparatus that Xià left blank, drawing on the wider Nèijīng / Nánjīng / Shānghán tradition Tú had studied in his own rú-to-medicine career.
The four juan cover: (1) general principles of pediatric massage technique, the ten standard hand-motions (tuī 推, ná 拿, qiā 掐, cuō 搓, yáo 搖, shè 攝, chě 扯, róu 揉, yùn 運, guā 刮, fēn 分, hé 和) and their indications; (2) face-and-head point-charts for pediatric massage diagnostics, jīngfēng 驚風 (acute child-fright) and mànjīng 慢驚 (chronic child-fright); (3) syndrome-by-syndrome treatment chapters with massage prescriptions plus oral herbal formulas calibrated to a six-year-old reference patient; (4) supplementary pediatric chapters and external-treatment recipes. The two named yǎzhèng 啞症 (“speechless syndromes”) chapters — a Tú innovation — collect childhood-onset speech and developmental disorders.
Abstract
Tuīná juéwēi is one of the principal Republican-era pediatric-massage monographs and the first such work to integrate the late-Qīng Bǎochì tuīná technical core with full classical diagnostic and pharmacotherapeutic apparatus. The work is well-attested: 張士傑 Zhāng Shìjié’s friendship-preface (KR3ee053_000.txt) dates the printed edition to Mínguó 17 = 1928, sixth month, and Tú’s own preface gives a circumstantial account of his Confucian-to-medical conversion, his discipleship under 陶石庵 Táo Shíān (a local tuīná expert), and his frustration with the three available tuīná monographs that had driven him to compile this corrective synthesis.
Catalog discrepancy. The data/catalogs/meta/KR3ee.yaml entry gives the author as 徐學修 (Xú Xuéxiū). This is not supported by the work itself: both the prefatory note by Zhāng Shìjié and the self-preface signed Mínguó shíqī nián wùchén Hénán Xìnyáng Tú Wèishēng 民國十七年戊辰河南信陽塗蔚生 unambiguously identify the author as Tú Wèishēng. “Xú Xuéxiū” appears nowhere in the front-matter and may be a later catalog mis-attribution (possibly the punctuator or local printer; possibly a confused reading of an editorial credit). The catalog meta is corrected here per the work’s own paratext.
Tú Wèishēng’s school of pediatric tuīná — known in 20th-century Chinese-medicine history as the Hénán Xìnyáng school — was a direct contributor to the post-1949 PRC standardization of pediatric massage as a recognized clinical specialty. The work is reprinted in the Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書 and circulates in multiple modern reprints.
Translations and research
- Lü Mínggāng 呂明剛 and Xú Hèng-zé 徐恆澤, Mín-guó Zhōng-yī yào míng-jiā zhuàn-lüè 民國中醫藥名家傳略, Beijing: Zhōng-yī gǔjí, 2002 — Tú Wèi-shēng entry.
- Yán Shìyún 嚴世芸 (ed.), Zhōng-yī rén-wù cí-diǎn 中醫人物辭典 — entry on Tú Wèi-shēng.
- Wang Shuomin 王朔民 (ed.), Zhōng-guó tuī-ná dà-quán 中國推拿大全, Beijing: Renmin weisheng, 1999, ch. on Republican-era tuī-ná.
Other points of interest
Tú’s polemical position — that pediatric tuīná without proper biànzhèng (syndrome-differentiation) diagnostic discipline produces dangerous practice (“the rustic crone… does not know what jīngluò are, does not know what acupoints are, … randomly rubs the child and calls it mǒjīng 抹驚 — so that infants die in incalculable numbers”) — is identical to the position taken in KR3ee054 (Lízhèng ànmó yàoshù), a Qīng predecessor with the same diagnostic concern. The two works should be read together as the principal 19th- and early-20th-century reform manifestos for pediatric massage as a biànzhèng-based medical specialty rather than a folk technique.
Links
- Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū.
- Kanseki DB
- 推拿抉微 (jicheng.tw)