Zhèngzhì zhāiyào 證治摘要
Selected Essentials on Syndrome and Treatment by 中川成章 (Nakagawa Shigeaki / Seishō, fl. 1840s–1860s, Edo)
About the work
A late-Edo kanpō 漢方 digest of Chinese internal medicine, in 2 juǎn, compiled by the Japanese physician Nakagawa Shigeaki as a teaching condensation of the Chinese zhèngzhì 證治 literature for Japanese students. The text strips its Chinese sources to clinical essentials — symptom complex, principal formula, brief etiological note — in the manner of the Edo koihō 古醫方 (ancient-formula) movement, which prioritised direct application of Han-period prescriptions over speculative cosmology.
Abstract
The work belongs to the broader corpus of late-Edo Japanese reworkings of Míng-Qīng internal-medicine compendia, in which Chinese clinical material is redacted into compact, clinically applicable, kōshōgaku-influenced primers for the Japanese medical-student market. Nakagawa’s selection-and-arrangement quietly enacts the koihō preference for early sources over late, for zhèngzhì (syndrome-and-treatment) literature over speculative cosmology, and for the Han-Tang formula tradition as the doctrinal anchor.
Lifedates and biographical details for Nakagawa are imprecise. The work is conventionally placed in the late Edo period (Tenpō 天保 to Bunkyū 文久 era, 1830–1864) on internal lexical and methodological grounds. The catalog dynasty marker 清 reflects contemporaneity with the Qīng rather than the work’s actual provenance.
Translations and research
- Daniel Trambaiolo, Writing, Authority, and Practice in Tokugawa Medicine, PhD diss., Princeton, 2014.
- Susan L. Burns, “Nanayama Jundō at Work,” in B. Elman, ed., Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
- Margaret Lock, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan. Berkeley: UC Press, 1980, ch. 2 on the Edo background to modern kanpō.
- No standalone English treatment of this text located.