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
- 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.