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婦科問答

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Text ID
KR3ei004
Date
1700–1900
Dynasty
清

Fùkē wèndá 婦科問答

Gynecology Questions and Answers anonymous

About the work

A short one-juǎn anonymous gynecology catechism organised in the question-and-answer (wèndá 問答) didactic format characteristic of Qīng popular medical literature. Total: 18 questions on jīngzhèng 經症 (menstrual disorders), 34 on tāiqián 胎前 (ante-natal), 34 on chǎnhòu 產後 (post-natal), and 43 on zázhèng 雜症 (miscellaneous women’s conditions including stroke, cough, urinary disorders, yīntòng 陰痛, perineal lesions, jiāoshāng 交傷 etc.) — totalling 129 numbered cases. Each entry follows a tight schema: clinical question → étiological discussion → named therapeutic decoction → drug list. The work is a practitioner’s vade-mecum rather than a treatise, with no doctrinal architecture: it is essentially a portable handbook for the village gynecology practitioner.

Prefaces

The jicheng.tw recension carries no separable preface; the text begins directly with “經症十八問. 一問：婦人室女，一生經閉不通，服何藥？” (“Menstrual disorders, eighteen questions. Question one: Married women and unmarried girls, life-long amenorrhoea — what should be administered?”). There is no catalog metadata identifying author, place of composition, or printer.

Abstract

The text is genuinely anonymous; the catalog meta provides no author or dynasty. Internal evidence supports a late-imperial (Qīng) dating: the work prescribes Bǔzhōng yìqì tāng 補中益氣湯 (Lǐ Dōngyuán, 13th c.), Xiāoyáo sǎn 逍遙散 (Héjì júfāng, Northern Sòng, but widely propagated in late-Míng and Qīng), Bāzhèng sǎn 八正散 (Northern Sòng), and the Qīnghún tāng 清魂湯 / Yìróng tāng 益榮湯 cluster of formulas that became standardised in the Yīzōng jīnjiàn 醫宗金鑑 (KR3e0090, 1742) gynecology section. The work draws on the post-1742 Yīzōng jīnjiàn formulary tradition without quoting that work directly, suggesting a circulation date in the late 18th or 19th century. The “13 chapter” / “thirteen-treatise” gynecological framework seen in KR3ei003 Zhāngshì fùkē is not used here; the Q&A format places this work squarely in the popular-didactic / examination-preparation lineage exemplified by 吳謙 Wú Qiān’s Yīzōng jīnjiàn (1742). The text is best understood as a regional folk-practitioner handbook of the kind that circulated in scribal copies and small-press woodblock editions in 19th-century Jiāngnán.

The work is paratextually unconnected to the major literati gynecological treatises (Fùrén dàquán liángfāng 婦人大全良方 KR3e0038, Jìyīn gāngmù 濟陰綱目 KR3ei006). It belongs squarely to the popular-folk-practitioner stratum identified by Yi-Li Wu in her work on Qīng popular gynecology.

Translations and research

  • Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010 — for the genre.
  • No dedicated study of the Fùkē wèndá located. This text belongs to the substantial but largely-unstudied corpus of Qīng popular gynecology handbooks now collected in the Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書 (the hxwd source-series).

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