Yòukē gàilùn 幼科概論
General Outline of Paediatrics by 光致 Guāngzhì (撰)
About the work
A single-juǎn Republican-period (Mínguó) paediatric primer of unknown authorship, surviving only under the zì/hào Guāngzhì 光致 in the author’s preface. The work explicitly positions itself as a practical clinical manual: “光致所講幼科，注重在實用二字，不尚虛文” — the paediatrics I (Guāngzhì) teach prizes practical usefulness in two words and does not value empty rhetoric — drawing on more than twenty years of the author’s clinical experience and on the principal Chinese-medical paediatric authorities (錢乙 Qián Yǐ, the Wàn family, 陳復正 Chén Fùzhèng). The catalog meta lists no author and no dynasty; both are inferred from internal evidence.
Prefaces
The author’s preface opens with a statement of clinical priorities: the diagnostic difficulty of paediatrics (“俗呼為啞科” — popularly called the silent department, because the child cannot answer the wèn 問 question-the-patient step of the four diagnostic procedures) demands twenty years’ clinical experience before competence; fingerprint reading (biàn zhǐwén 辨指紋) and pulse-diagnosis are merely supplementary; the principal task remains a biànzhèng 辨證 analysis along the conventional eight-rubric (biǎolǐ xūshí hánrè 表裡虛實寒熱) axes. The preface continues directly into the body of the work, with no separate dating colophon.
Abstract
The text is one of several anonymous Republican-period paediatric handbooks whose authorship has been lost in twentieth-century transmission. Internal stylistic and conceptual evidence — citation of jīngfēng 驚風 nosology, of 李東垣 Lǐ Dōngyuán and 張景岳 Zhāng Jǐngyuè by name, anti-formulary polemic (“漫以驚風之名可乎” — can such conditions truly be labelled jīngfēng?), and a vocabulary that mixes the late-Qīng yīhuà 醫話 idiom with the early-Republican jiǎngyì 講義 lecture-text genre — places it in the early Republic (c. 1912–1949). The work begins with general principles (zǒnglùn 總論), then proceeds through bǎotāi 保胎 (infant hygiene), wàirè / nèirè 外熱/內熱 (fever differential), an extended polemic against the jīngfēng 驚風 diagnostic category, gān 疳 chronic-malnutrition syndromes, dòuzhěn 痘疹 eruptive fevers, and specific clinical entities. The principal contribution is the methodological insistence — almost a moral imperative — that paediatric clinical reasoning be tied to the same biǎolǐ xūshí hánrè analytical schema used for adults, with the difficulty being entirely diagnostic rather than nosological.
Translations and research
- No substantial secondary literature on this specific text located. General context: Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014); Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse (Chicago, 2014).
Other points of interest
The text’s polemic against the jīngfēng 驚風 diagnosis is unusual for its energy. The author argues that what is conventionally called jíjīngfēng 急驚風 (acute jīngfēng) is in fact tánhuǒ bì 痰火閉 (phlegm-fire obstruction) and what is called mànjīngfēng 慢驚風 (chronic jīngfēng) is píxū shēngfēng 脾虛生風 (spleen-deficiency wind-generation), and that the conventional terminology has caused incalculable iatrogenic harm by inviting indiscriminate use of “convulsion-pellet” (jīngfēng wánzǐ 驚風丸子) preparations. This places the work in the Republican-period scholarly-paediatric polemic against folk and patent-medicine practice.