Yángmáo wēn zhènglùn 羊毛瘟證論
Treatise on the Syndrome of “Sheep’s-Wool Plague” by 隨霖 (Suí Lín, 清)
About the work
A late-Qīng monograph on the unusual disease category of yángmáo wēn 羊毛瘟 — literally “sheep’s-wool plague” — a folk-medical syndrome of epidemic febrile disease characterised by the appearance of fine hair-like fibres on the patient’s skin (interpreted by the indigenous tradition as the visible manifestation of pestilential pathogen exteriorising through the skin). In 1 juǎn.
Abstract
Yángmáo wēn is one of a small group of folk-medical pestilential-disease categories named for distinctive cutaneous signs — paralleling the shā 痧 category (cf. 郭志邃 Guō Zhìsuì’s Shāzhàng yùhéng, KR3eg037). The category circulated principally in north-Chinese and central-plain folk medicine; the modern medical retrospective identification is uncertain (variously suggested as scarlet fever, typhus, or other rickettsial / febrile presentations with cutaneous manifestations).
The text’s principal contribution is the systematic indigenous-clinical description of the syndrome — its symptomatology, the differential diagnostic markers that distinguish yángmáo wēn from other warm-disease and shā presentations, and the prescription apparatus. The doctrinal framework is the Qīng wēnbìng / wēnyì tradition.
Dating and authorial detail not preserved with precision. The text is conventionally placed in the late Qīng on doctrinal grounds.
Translations and research
- Hanson, Marta. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine. Routledge, 2011 — context on the broader spectrum of Qīng-period epidemic-disease categories.
- No substantial dedicated secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The yángmáo wēn category is a useful reminder that the Qīng wēnbìng / wēnyì tradition was not a hermetically codified canonical apparatus but an active clinical-categorical world in which folk-medical disease categories continued to be incorporated, theorised, and contested. The category survives marginally into the modern TCM literature.