Fùshì nánkē 傅氏男科
Mr Fù’s Manual of Male Medicine attributed to 傅山 (Fù Shān, zì Qīngzhú 青主, 1607–1684)
About the work
The male-medicine companion to the celebrated FùQīngzhǔ nǚkē 傅青主女科 (Mr Fù’s Manual of Female Medicine), in 3 juǎn, presenting a comparable formulary for men’s conditions in the same plain-language, no-pulse-only-symptom style. Like the Nǚkē, the attribution to Fù Shān is almost certainly editorial: the work surfaces only in the late-Qīng print market with the Tóngzhì-era 1863 edition by 王道平 Wáng Dàopíng and the Guāngxù-era 1886 expansion by 田嵩峻 Tián Sōngjùn.
Abstract
Fù Shān (1607–1684; CBDB 30248) was a Míng loyalist scholar, calligrapher, painter, philosopher, and reputed physician whose name became a marketable attribution in the post-Tàipíng late-Qīng book market. The Fùshì nánkē attribution is late-Qīng editorial — Wáng Dàopíng’s 1863 preface candidly relates that a colleague had argued no such nánkē (male medicine) existed because “one who can treat ten men is not the equivalent of one who treats a woman” (能治十男子，不治一婦人), and the text appeared only after a forty-year manuscript circulation in Shānxī, said to have been transmitted via 孫毓芝 Sūn Yùzhī from the Luó family.
Modern philological scholarship — 何高民 Hé Gāomín’s Fù Qīngzhǔ nǚkē jiàoshì 傅青主女科校釋 (Shānxī rénmín, 1979) and follow-up studies — treats both the Nǚkē and the Nánkē as Qīng compilations from medical material loosely associated with the Fù lineage rather than as autograph works of Fù Shān himself. The very title 傅氏 (“Mr Fù”) rather than 傅青主 (Fù Qīngzhǔ — Fù Shān’s zì, by which he is normally referenced) is itself a hedge on the attribution.
The composition window of 1860–1886 here reflects the dating of the received recension, not the conventional 17th-century dating of Fù Shān’s lifetime; the text in our hands is the late-Qīng print, and the Míng / early-Qīng material it incorporates (if any) is not separable from the editorial accretion.
Translations and research
- 何高民 Hé Gāomín, Fù Qīngzhǔ nǚkē jiàoshì 傅青主女科校釋. Tàiyuán: Shānxī rénmín, 1979 — the standard critical edition with detailed discussion of the attribution problem; relevant for the Nánkē as well.
- Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: UC Press, 1999 — for the broader Fù-Qīng-zhǔ attributional question.
- Bai Qianshen, Fu Shan’s World: The Transformation of Chinese Calligraphy in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003 — the standard Western monograph on Fù Shān, treating the medical attributions sceptically.
- No standalone English translation located.
Links
- See 傅山 person note.
- 傅氏男科 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB