Mìchuán dàmáfēng fāng 祕傳大麻瘋方
Secret Transmission of Prescriptions for Great Leprosy anonymous
About the work
A specialised formulary on dàfēng / máfēng 大麻瘋 (the late-imperial catch-all corresponding most closely to leprosy / Hansen’s disease and overlapping skin scourges), in 1 juǎn. Part of the late-imperial proliferation of single-disease zhuānshū 專書 in the leprosy domain. Compiles internally and externally administered prescriptions, dietary prohibitions, and prognosis indicators.
Abstract
The work is anonymous and undated, with no preserved preface; provenance must be inferred entirely from contents and lexicon. The use of dàmáfēng 大麻瘋 / máfēng and the inclusion of opium-related materials (yāpiàn 鴉片) place it tentatively in the late Qīng — somewhere between c. 1700 and c. 1900.
The text belongs to a relatively well-defined late-imperial sub-genre: leprosy formularies derived from the Buddhist hospice tradition (the liùjiè 六界 leper hospitals run by Buddhist institutions across the Míng-Qīng) and from the broader proliferation of single-disease 專書 in the late-Qīng book market. Likely a compilation drawn from earlier fēngmén 瘋門 works such as the 解圍元藪 Jiěwéi yuánsǒu (1554) and from the Buddhist hospice tradition that Angela Ki Che Leung has documented.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
- Angela Ki Che Leung, Leprosy in China: A History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009 — definitive monograph, treating exactly this corpus of late-Míng / Qīng leprosy formularies.
- Hinrichs & Barnes 2013, Chinese Medicine and Healing, on the lì/lài/rài vocabulary continuum.
- 劉斌雄 Liú Bīnxióng et al., Zhōngguó máfēng bìngshǐ 中國麻瘋病史. Beijing, 1995.
- No standalone English translation located.