Jǐyáng gāngmù 濟陽綱目
Outline and Detail for Male/General Medicine by 武之望 (Wǔ Zhīwàng, zì Shūqīng 叔卿, hào Yángyū 陽紆, 1552–1629)
About the work
An immense late-Míng nosological encyclopedia of male and general internal medicine in 108 juǎn, designed as the male-counterpart to Wǔ’s earlier Jǐyīn gāngmù 濟陰綱目 (1620, on women’s medicine). Organised as “outline-and-detail” (gāngmù 綱目) following the 朱熹 Zhū Xī-style classificatory schema: each disease entry assembles sources from the Nèijīng, 張機 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng, the Táng-Sòng formularies, the LiúLǐZhū 劉李朱 (JīnYuán Four Masters), and Ming clinicians, followed by Wǔ’s own commentary and a curated selection of formulas.
Abstract
The Jǐyīn / Jǐyáng pair is the apex of the late-Míng gāngmù compilation genre alongside 王肯堂 Wáng Kěntáng’s six-section Liùkē zhèngzhì zhǔnshéng (see KR3eh011). Wǔ Zhīwàng’s central editorial conceit — that women’s and men’s medicine are a single discipline differentiated only by yīn and yáng substrate, and that the two works should be read as a pendant pair — is one of the most considered late-Míng articulations of gender-medicine doctrine, and Charlotte Furth’s A Flourishing Yin takes the Jǐyīn gāngmù as the principal late-Míng exhibit for the institutional culmination of women’s medicine as a discrete kē (specialty).
The Jǐyáng gāngmù belongs to the same late period of Wǔ’s career — likely 1620 onward, contemporaneous with the Jǐyīn — but was completed and printed posthumously, with the standard edition dated to the Tiānqǐ–Chóngzhēn transition. Wǔ’s death by suicide in 1629 (after the loss of Yúlín 榆林 to rebels during his governor-generalship of Shǎnxī) cut short the compositional and editorial process. The standard bibliographic count of 108 juǎn reflects an internal sub-juan structure in which several minor scrolls were merged in the jicheng.tw edition.
The Jǐyáng gāngmù survived less well than the Jǐyīn in the early-Qīng print market and was less frequently reprinted; the work’s textual transmission shows redactional layers and the received text was re-edited in the Qīng.
Translations and research
- Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: UC Press, 1999 — extensive treatment of Wǔ’s Jǐyīn gāngmù and the Jǐyáng / Jǐyīn gender-medicine pair.
- 吳一立 Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: UC Press, 2010 — context for the Jǐyīn tradition.
- Hinrichs & Barnes 2013, Chinese Medicine and Healing, ch. 4 — context for the late-Míng nosological compendium genre.
- No substantial Western-language treatment of the Jǐyáng gāngmù itself located.