Yīxué zhèngchuán 醫學正傳
Orthodox Transmission of Medical Learning by 虞摶 (Yú Tuán, zì Tiānmín 天民, 1438–1517)
About the work
Yú Tuán’s eight-juǎn synthetic medical treatise, completed in Zhèngdé 10 = 1515 (Yú was then 78) and first printed in Jiājìng xīnmǎo = 1531. Opens with the Yīxué huòwèn 醫學或問 — fifty-one short essays addressing disputed questions of medical doctrine — then proceeds disease-by-disease across more than ninety syndromes covering internal medicine, surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics, and ENT. Each disease entry is structured as lùn 論 (general discussion) — màifǎ 脈法 (pulse signs) — fāngfǎ 方法 (treatment principle) — Dānxī huótào 丹溪活套 (extracts from Zhū Dānxī’s working clinical heuristics) — yīàn 醫案 (case-records) — zǔchuán fāng 祖傳方 (family-transmitted prescriptions). Some 900 prescriptions and 44 cases (one of them a surviving Dānxī case) are preserved.
Abstract
Yú Tuán is the principal mid-Míng systematiser of the Zhū Dānxī medical tradition — his great-grandfather having studied under Zhū directly — and the Yīxué zhèngchuán is the canonical fourth-generation synthesis of that lineage. The work’s title — zhèngchuán “orthodox transmission” — signals Yú’s claim to the Dānxī mainline, but his methodology is consciously synthetic: each zhèng opens by anchoring discussion in the Sù wèn / Nán jīng doctrinal foundation, then proceeds through Zhòngjǐng-school cold-damage methods (for shānghán), 李杲 Lǐ Gǎo (for nèishāng internal-damage syndromes), 錢乙 Qián Yǐ (for paediatrics), and Zhū Dānxī (for the bulk of zábìng differential diagnosis). The Dānxī huótào extracts are particularly valuable as a redaction of Zhū’s clinical practice in compact form.
The work was published nine years before the Bǎnpǔ Jiājìng xīnmǎo (1531) imprint and circulated rapidly through the Míng book market. It was reprinted in Wànlì 5 (1577) and 6 (1578), and in Edo Japan in 1604, 1622, and 1659, where it became one of the foundational Chinese-medical texts of the koihō / tōyō-igaku tradition. The Rénmín Wèishēng punctuated edition (1965; reissued 1981) remains the standard.
The Yīxué zhèngchuán is among the works most frequently cited in 李時珍 Lǐ Shízhēn’s Běncǎo gāngmù 本草綱目 — in particular for its prescription material and case-records — and is therefore one of the principal documentary witnesses for late-Míng clinical practice.
The catalog meta records the author’s surname-character as 虞傳 (a typographical slip for 虞摶 — the huái with the shǒu radical, not the yán of 傳); the standard form is 虞摶, restored in the frontmatter here.
Translations and research
- Yīxué zhèngchuán punctuated edition, Beijing: Rénmín wèishēng chūbǎnshè, 1965 / 1981 — the standard modern edition.
- 吳一立 Wú Yīyī (Yi-Li Wu), “A Medical Line of Many Masters: A Prosopographical Study of Liu Wansu and His Disciples from the Jin to the Early Ming,” Chinese Science 11 (1994): 36–65 — for the lineage context within which Yú Tuán operates.
- Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: UC Press, 1999 — touches on Yú in the gynaecology context.
- No standalone English translation located.