Tōngsú nèikē xué 通俗內科學
A Popular Internal Medicine by 張拯滋 (Zhāng Zhěngzī, fl. early Republican)
About the work
A vernacular Chinese-medical internal-medicine textbook in the ZhōngXī huìtōng 中西匯通 (Sino-Western synthesis) mode characteristic of the early Republican reform of Chinese medicine. Self-prefaced bǐngchén chūn zhèngyuè = January 1916, and widely circulated through inclusion in the 1936 Zhēnběn yīshū jíchéng 珍本醫書集成 (Shanghai: Shìjiè shūjú). Not divided into traditional juǎn but structured by Western-style chapters and sections by organ-system and disease.
Abstract
The work belongs to the broader early-Republican project — initiated a generation earlier by 唐宗海 Táng Zōnghǎi (see KR3eh012) — to recast Chinese medicine in a textbook-standardised form responsive to the institutional and epistemic challenge of Western-style biomedicine. Zhāng adopts Western nosology and pathophysiology — fèibìng 肺病 (tuberculosis) treated with explicit attention to sanitation and dietary regimen; biǎntáoxiàn yán 扁桃腺炎 (tonsillitis) as a discrete disease entity; nüèjí 瘧疾 (malaria) distinguished from the classical fever-pattern nüè — but prescribes Chinese herbal formulae, anchored on 張機 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng (e.g. Xiǎo cháihú tāng 小柴胡湯) and the JīnYuán Four Masters.
Zhāng explicitly positions himself as géxīn guóyī zhī xiānqū 革新國醫之先驅, “a pioneer of the renewal of national medicine,” in the contemporary debate over the survival of zhōngyī 中醫 in the face of the early-Republican government’s flirtations with banning it. The text is one of the documentary witnesses to the 1910s–1930s textbook-standardisation movement that produced, in this period, dozens of comparable single-author internal-medicine reform-textbooks intended both for student physicians and for educated lay readers.
The composition date of 1916 (Zhāng’s self-preface) precedes the printing date of 1936 (Shìjiè shūjú edition) by twenty years; the bracket given here reflects this. The catalog dynasty marker should be read as Mínguó 民國 rather than Qīng 清.
Translations and research
- Reprinted in Zhēnběn yīshū jíchéng 珍本醫書集成 (Shanghai: Shìjiè shūjú, 1936; reprints).
- Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014 — context for the early-Republican textbook reform movement.
- Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014 — the institutional politics behind the survival of Chinese medicine in the Republican era.
- No standalone English treatment of this text located.