Shǔyì yuēbiān 鼠疫約編
Concise Compendium on Bubonic Plague by 羅汝蘭 (Luó Rǔlán, Liánjiāng 廉江 / Guǎngdōng, late 清)
About the work
The principal Chinese-medical monograph composed in immediate response to the 1890–1894 Guǎngdōng plague epidemic — the South China onset of the Third Plague Pandemic. Composed by the Liánjiāng physician Luó Rǔlán, who saw the epidemic at first hand in the Léizhōu peninsula area. Sometimes printed under the title Shǔyì huìbiān 鼠疫汇編 (“Plague Compendium”). The text is among the most historically significant late-Qīng epidemic-medicine texts: it documents the Chinese-medical response to the disease subsequently identified as bubonic plague.
Abstract
The epidemiological context. Plague had circulated in Yúnnán since the late 18th century (Benedict 1996). In the 19th century it began moving down the Xījiāng 西江 corridor and reached Hépǔ 合浦 (in the Léizhōu peninsula area) and then by maritime transport reached Guǎngzhōu. A 1956 survey by the Guǎngzhōu Anti-Epidemic Station documented that plague broke out in Guǎngzhōu as early as February 1890 and recurred each February–May from 1890 through 1893 in small localised outbreaks. Authorities took no notice; no public-health response was mounted. In February 1894 the small annual outbreak erupted into a major epidemic that swept Guǎngzhōu, then spread to Hong Kong (May 1894), and from there along maritime trade routes to the rest of the world — initiating the Third Plague Pandemic, in which 12–15 million people died globally.
Luó’s Shǔyì yuēbiān is among the first Chinese-medical responses. The work systematically expounds the symptomatology, transmission (he notes the precedence of rat-mortality, hence the name shǔyì “rat-plague”), and treatment of the disease. The doctrinal framework is Qīng wēnbìng-school — heat-clearing and blood-cooling prescriptions, with attention to the rapid clinical course.
In modern retrospect Luó’s clinical material is one of the best Chinese-medical documentations of bubonic plague before the discovery of Yersinia pestis in Hong Kong by Yersin (June 1894) and Kitasato; it represents the most refined practical response to plague available under the pre-bacteriological clinical apparatus.
Translations and research
- Benedict, Carol. Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China. Stanford: SUP, 1996 — the definitive English-language study. Chinese ed. Shàngwù, 2013.
- Wilkinson, Endymion, Chinese History: A New Manual (Harvard, 2018), §41.7.6, lists Benedict’s monograph as principal.
- Lei, Sean Hsiang-lin. Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity. UChP, 2014 — relevant for the Manchurian pneumonic plague (1910–11) sequel.
- Jiāng Zhōng-hè 姜鍾赫, “鼠疫與香港殖民醫學下的華人女性病患(1841–1900)”, Bulletin of Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica — local study.
- No standalone English translation located.
Other points of interest
The 1894 Guǎngzhōu / Hong Kong epidemic and Luó’s Shǔyì yuēbiān are one of the most historically consequential cases in modern medical history: the same outbreak that prompted Luó’s Chinese-medical treatise also enabled Yersin’s bacteriological identification of Yersinia pestis in Hong Kong in June 1894 — the moment that founded modern bacteriological epidemiology of plague.