Zhōngguó nèikē yījiàn 中國內科醫鑑

Mirror of Chinese Internal Medicine by 大塚敬節 (Ōtsuka Keisetsu, 1900–1980)

About the work

A 1933 Shōwa-era Japanese kanpō 漢方 handbook of Chinese internal medicine by Ōtsuka Keisetsu, the most influential 20th-century revivalist of the koihō 古醫方 (ancient-formula) tradition and a founding figure of modern Japanese kanpō. Internally arranged in two parts — qián piān 前篇 (Symptoms and Treatment) and hòu piān 後篇 (clinical sections by cause / symptom / therapy / bèikǎo 備考).

Abstract

The work was composed in 1933 (Shōwa 8). The preface by 權藤成卿 Gondō Seikyō is dated Shōwa hachi-nen banshū 昭和八年晚秋 = autumn 1933, and Ōtsuka’s own fánlì (凡例 / editorial principles) is dated Shōwa hachi-nen jūniyuè = December 1933.

The text was originally to be a collaboration: the lower volume to be drafted by Ōtsuka’s teacher 湯本求真 Yumoto Kyūshin (1876–1941, author of the foundational 1927 Kōkan igaku 皇漢醫學 — see KR3ef059 tradition), with Ōtsuka writing the upper volume. When Yumoto fell ill, Ōtsuka completed both. The work systematically maps biomedical internal-medicine categories — drawing on 橋本節齋 Hashimoto Setsuzai’s Naika zensho — onto Han-formula therapy, drawing on Ōtsuka’s clinical experience under Yumoto. The preface frames the work explicitly as a synthesis of Western diagnostics and classical Chinese formula therapy — a programmatic statement of the modern Japanese kanpō revival.

The catalog meta records the author’s name as 大塜敬節, a typographical variant of the standard form 大塚敬節 (Ōtsuka Keisetsu); the standard form is restored in the frontmatter and prose here. The work is, strictly speaking, a 20th-century work and is anomalous in a Kanripo corpus dominated by premodern texts; it is included here because of its classical-Chinese register and its programmatic recovery of the Han-formula tradition.

Translations and research

  • Margaret Lock, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan. Berkeley: UC Press, 1980, pp. 55–78 — extensive treatment of Ōtsuka and the modern kanpō movement.
  • Christopher Harding et al., eds., Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan. London: Routledge, 2015 — background on early-Shōwa medical revivalism.
  • Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014 — parallel Sino-Japanese revivalist currents.
  • No standalone English translation located.