溫病之研究

Wēnbìng zhī yánjiū 溫病之研究

Researches on Warm Disease (Japanese: Onpyō no kenkyū) by 源元凱 (Minamoto Genkai, Edo-period Japan); with 源德輿 (Minamoto Tokuyō, Edo-period Japan)

About the work

A substantial Edo-period Japanese kanpō 漢方 monograph on warm-disease, written in literary Chinese, doctrinally engaged with 吳有性 Wú Yǒuxìng’s Wēnyì lùn (KR3eg004) and the Lǐngnán wèishēng fāng 嶺南衛生方, growing directly out of the author’s clinical experience during the Tenmei 8 (1788) Kyoto epidemic. The text contains substantial doctrinal innovations developed jointly with Minamoto’s son 源德輿 Tokuyō. It was transmitted to China and included in 湯本求真 Yumoto Kyūshin’s Huáng Hàn yīxué cóngshū (Shanghai, 1936).

Abstract

The preface fixes the immediate clinical context. In the spring of Tenmei wùshēn 戊申 (1788), a great fire destroyed 100,000 households in Kyoto; warm-disease epidemic followed in the spring and summer. Many cases presented with “exhaustion above and depletion below” (上盈下虛), i.e. shàoyīn 少陰 patterns predominating. Conventional Wú Yǒuxìng-style treatment was failing — patients given dàhuáng 大黃 died, patients given fùzǐ 附子 lived. Minamoto turned to the Yuán-period Lǐngnán wèishēng fāng — the Yuán-period gazetteer-style treatise on Lǐngnán “miasma” diseases — and found in it the fùzǐ protocol that fitted the clinical picture. Several hundred patients later, he had developed an integrated framework, which he wrote up as the present Wēnbìng zhī yánjiū.

Doctrinal innovations:

1. Refinement of Wú Yǒuxìng’s “miscellaneous qi” (záqì 雜氣) theory. Minamoto agrees that Wú’s identification of pestilential disease with a záqì — within which the most fierce variety, lìqì 厲氣, is the agent of wēnyì — is the great insight of the early Qīng. But he criticises Wú for treating záqì as something altogether outside the canonical six qi, “with no observable source or manifestation, vague as the Milky Way”. Minamoto argues that záqì is in fact the transformed product of the six qi themselves in their disordered (bùzhèng 不正) state, not a parallel category.

2. Rigid versus soft pathogen (剛邪 / 柔邪 gō-ja / jū-ja) — Minamoto’s principal innovation. Both classes of pathogen lodge in the móyuán 膜原; rigid is fierce and follows the standard Wú-style transmission into the yángmíng stomach-channel; soft is sluggish and cannot transmit to the stomach, instead descending directly into shàoyīn and producing the “exhaustion-above, depletion-below” pattern that defined the 1788 Kyoto presentation. This is analogous to the Shānghán liǎnggǎn 兩感 (dual-contraction) doctrine. Wú Yǒuxìng’s flat declaration that “wēnyì has no yīn-syndrome” is not Wú’s error but reflects that the soft-pathogen variant was not current in Wú’s own Jiāngnán clinical experience.

3. Therapeutic principle. Minamoto agrees with Wú that early eviction of the pathogen is critical: “the key to a good physician is to recognise where the pathogen is, and pull it out by the root early”. But against Wú’s dàhuáng protocol — which Minamoto argues is dangerous in lower-burner-deficient patients — Minamoto proposes melon-stalk (guādì 瓜蒂) emetic as the principal therapy: “search out the den of the pathogen and drive it out by the door it came in”, on the principle that the disease entered through mouth and nose and should be expelled by the same route.

The work circulated in Japan during the Bunsei-Tenpō era and was an important kanpō contribution to the East Asian wēnbìng literature.

Translations and research

• Huáng Hàn yī-xué cóng-shū 皇漢醫學叢書, ed. 湯本求真 Tāngběn Qiúzhēn. Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936, vol. 8.
• Hanson, Marta. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine. Routledge, 2011 — context on Sino-Japanese wēn-bìng exchange.
• Shirasugi Etsuko 白杉悦子, Kinsei Nihon no kanpō to onpyō-gaku 近世日本の漢方と溫病學 (modern Japanese-language survey).
• No standalone English translation located.

Other points of interest

The 1788 Kyoto epidemic that prompted this book is the principal Edo-period epidemic against which the Japanese wēnbìng commentary tradition crystallised. Minamoto’s rigid-soft pathogen distinction is a genuinely original doctrinal contribution and a significant Japanese addition to the Sino-Japanese wēnyì corpus.

Links

• 國家圖書館掃描本 (1936 World Bookstore edition).
• 溫病之研究 jicheng.tw
• Kanseki DB