Xīndìng dòuzhěn jìshì zhēnquán 新訂痘疹濟世真詮
Newly Revised Authentic Compendium on Saving Lives from Smallpox and Eruptive Fever by an anonymous Qīng-period editor (compiler)
About the work
A large Qīng-period smallpox-and-measles compilation preserved as a single very long file in the hxwd corpus (~107 K tokens). The catalog meta entry provides no author and no dynasty. The title’s xīndìng 新訂 (“newly revised”) signals editorial recensioning of an earlier Dòuzhěn jìshì zhēnquán 痘疹濟世真詮; the zhēnquán 真詮 (“authentic compendium”) title-element is itself a borrowing from the late-Míng / early-Qīng practical-medicine genre. The work belongs to the family of synthetic zǒnglùn + formulary compilations that proliferated in the high-and-late Qīng paediatric dòuzhěn literature.
Prefaces
Source-file extraction limited by file size; no preface excerpt available from the _000.txt frontmatter. The work has no recoverable colophon in the hxwd recension.
Abstract
The Xīndìng dòuzhěn jìshì zhēnquán belongs to the late-Qīng synthetic-compilation tradition of paediatric dòuzhěn literature. Without a recoverable preface or colophon, the work cannot be precisely dated; the hxwd meta gives no dynasty marker. On internal-genre evidence — the xīndìng / jìshì zhēnquán title format, the synthetic compilation structure, and the hxwd recensional tradition — the work is most likely a high or late Qīng (c. 1700–1900) editorial recension of an earlier paediatric dòuzhěn treatise. The work cannot be reliably attributed to a named author from the hxwd recension alone; the xīndìng prefix indicates a re-editor whose name is not transmitted.
The text appears to be substantially extended over its source treatises, characteristic of the Qīng practice of issuing xīndìng / xīnjuān 新鐫 editions that incorporate post-publication clinical addenda and revised commentary. Without external bibliographic anchoring, more precise dating is not possible.
Cataloging note: the source file is unusually large for a single-juan _000.txt entry, suggesting either that the hxwd recension preserves the entire work in a single text-stream or that the original recension had a complex internal structure (multiple juǎn concatenated). The substantive content has not been examined exhaustively from the source extraction.
Translations and research
- No substantial scholarship on this anonymous editorial recension located.
- See Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011) and Chia-feng Chang’s smallpox-history work for the late-Qīng synthetic-compilation context.
Other points of interest
The Xīndìng dòuzhěn jìshì zhēnquán exemplifies the anonymous synthetic-compilation stratum of late-Qīng paediatric medicine: edited collections, often without surviving author or compiler attribution, that pool material from multiple named smallpox authorities (Qián Yǐ, Chén Wénzhòng, Wàn Quán, Wèng Zhòngrén, Yè Tiānshì, etc.) into single one-volume practical handbooks. The genre is bibliographically frustrating but clinically representative of how paediatric smallpox medicine was actually transmitted at the village-practitioner level in the late Qīng.