Héshì xūláo xīnchuán 何氏虛勞心傳
The Hé Family’s Heart-Transmission on Consumption by 何炫 (Hé Xuàn, zì Lìngzhāo 令昭, 1662–1722)
About the work
A concise, polemical jiāchuán 家傳 (family-transmission) monograph in 1 juǎn on xūláo 虛勞 (consumptive disorders), comprising a zǒnglùn 總論 (general discussion) framing the etiology as five-organ exhaustion of zhēnyīn 真陰 (true yīn-essence), followed by the famous qīwù 七誤 (“seven mistakes”) chapter cataloguing seven common mis-treatments of consumption — yǐnhuǒ guīyuán 引火歸元, lǐzhōng wēnbǔ 理中溫補, shēnqí zhùhuǒ 參耆助火, kǔhán xièhuǒ 苦寒瀉火 etc.
Abstract
Hé Xuàn was the eighteenth-generation representative of the Qīngpǔ 青浦 (Shanghai region) Héshì 何氏 hereditary medical lineage — one of the longest documented family-medical traditions in late-imperial China. His central doctrinal thesis — that xūláo is fundamentally a zhēnyīn deficiency that wēnbǔ worsens, against the SòngMíng bǔyáng mainstream — became foundational for the Qīng-era Héshì school of Qīngpǔ medicine, and is doctrinally continuous with the slightly later treatises of 陸懋修 Lù Màoxiū and the MèngHé 孟河 school.
The composition belongs to Hé’s mature working years, c. 1690–1722; the dating bracket here reflects his lifedates. The work is gendered in a way that has interested modern scholars: the consumption of shīní guǎfù shìnǚ 師尼寡婦室女 (nuns, widows, virgins) is treated as a paradigmatic clinical category, in continuity with the late-Míng obstetric / gynaecological traditions whose central figure was 薛己 Xuē Jǐ.
The CBDB entry for 何炫 (id 294233) is a Míng homonym, not the Qīng medical author; the medical Hé Xuàn lacks a CBDB record. Lifedates 1662–1722 follow the consensus of the Qīngpǔ family genealogies and standard medical biographies.
Translations and research
- Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine, 1626–2006. Seattle: Eastland, 2007 — extended treatment of the Qīngpǔ Héshì lineage across nearly thirty generations.
- Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine. London: Routledge, 2011, ch. 4 — Jiāngnán xūláo doctrine.
- 吳一立 Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: UC Press, 2010 — peripherally for the gendered framing of xūláo.
- No standalone English translation located.