Shàoxiǎo yīngrú fāng 少小嬰孺方
Recipes for Young Children and Infants by 孫思邈 Sūn Sīmiǎo (撰)
About the work
The Shàoxiǎo yīngrú fāng is the title given in the hxwd recension and the Taishō (T) catalog to the paediatric materials extracted from Sūn Sīmiǎo 孫思邈’s monumental Tang-period Qiānjīn yàofāng 千金要方 (650s) and Qiānjīn yìfāng 千金翼方 (680s). The catalog meta entry lists Sūn Sīmiǎo as author and assigns dynasty: 唐 (Táng).
In the original Qiānjīn yàofāng the paediatric materials are organised across multiple chapters, primarily in chapter 5 (Shàoxiǎo yīngrú fāng) and adjacent chapters. The chapter is one of the earliest systematic paediatric treatises in the Chinese medical tradition, predating both Qián Yǐ’s Sòng paediatric synthesis and the Western paediatric specialisation by approximately a millennium and a half.
Prefaces
The hxwd source file KR3ej070_001.txt contains only the file header; no body content is preserved in the hxwd recension. The work must be consulted in the full Qiānjīn yàofāng and Qiānjīn yìfāng for substantive textual content.
Abstract
The Shàoxiǎo yīngrú fāng is the paediatric chapter of Sūn Sīmiǎo’s Qiānjīn yàofāng (650s) and Qiānjīn yìfāng (680s). The chapter establishes the foundational doctrine of Chinese paediatric medicine as a distinct medical specialty, articulating principles of paediatric pathology (children as xuèqì wèi shí 血氣未實 — incompletely developed in qì-blood; with zàngfǔ jiāonèn 臟腑嬌嫩 — delicate and tender organs); paediatric assessment (the fēngqìmìng 風氣命 finger-vein examination, the xìnmén 囟門 fontanelle palpation, the facial-color wǔsè 五色 reading); and paediatric therapeutics (carefully reduced doses, emphasis on tuīná and topical applications for very young children for whom decoction medicine is difficult to administer).
Substantive content: detailed fāng (formulas) for the major paediatric disorders of the Táng era — neonatal qífēng 臍風 (navel-wind/tetanus), jīngfēng 驚風 (convulsive fevers), gān 疳 (chronic malnutrition / failure-to-thrive syndromes), xièlì 泄痢 (diarrhoea/dysentery), kěbìng 咳病 (cough/respiratory disease), fārè 發熱 (fever syndromes), jíjīng 急驚 / mànjīng 慢驚 (acute and chronic convulsions), biànzhèng 變蒸 (developmental fevers), and others. The Qiānjīn yàofāng paediatric chapter is the principal source for Táng-period paediatric clinical doctrine and was widely cited in subsequent Sòng paediatric works.
The hxwd corpus’s separate cataloging of this as a “work” with id KR3ej070 reflects a long-standing bibliographic convention of treating Sūn Sīmiǎo’s paediatric chapters as a discrete fāngshū book; in textual reality this is a constituent part of the larger Qiānjīn corpus.
Sūn Sīmiǎo’s birth-date is conventionally given as 581 (though some sources place him in the 540s); his death year is 682. The paediatric chapters of Qiānjīn yàofāng are dated to the 650s, and those of Qiānjīn yìfāng to the 670s–early 680s.
Translations and research
- Sabine Wilms, Bei Ji Qian Jin Yao Fang: Essential Prescriptions Worth a Thousand in Gold for Every Emergency, Volumes 2–4: Gynecology and Pediatrics. Cambridge: Chinese Medicine Database, 2018 — the principal Western-language translation of Sūn Sī-miǎo’s Qiān-jīn yào-fāng paediatric chapters.
- Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. UC Press, 1999 — discussion of Sūn Sī-miǎo’s paediatric and gynecological doctrine.
- Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas. UC Press, 1985, esp. pp. 96–112 — for Sūn Sī-miǎo’s place in the medieval Chinese medical tradition.
- Lúo Sī-hóng, Sūn Sī-miǎo Qiān-jīn yào-fāng yán-jiū (multiple editions) — for Chinese-language scholarship.
Other points of interest
The Táng paediatric chapter is, with the slightly later (10th-c.) Lúxìn jīng 顱囟經, one of the two foundational pre-Sòng paediatric texts. Qián Yǐ’s Xiǎo’ér yàozhèng zhíjué (Sòng, late 11th c.) — the conventional founding text of systematic paediatric medicine — draws substantially on the Sūn Sīmiǎo materials. The hxwd recension’s preservation of the Sūn paediatric content as a separately catalogued work (KR3ej070) reflects the late-imperial habit of treating these chapters as a discrete shàoxiǎo yīngrú book within the yòukē (paediatric specialty) bibliography.
The chapter’s doctrine of biànzhèng (developmental fevers) — that children undergo a regular cycle of constitutional transformation accompanied by minor fevers, with no pathological significance — originates here and is transmitted through the entire subsequent Chinese paediatric tradition.
Links
- 少小嬰孺方 jicheng.tw
- Kanseki DB
- Sun Simiao Wikidata — for the author.
- Qianjin Yaofang Wikipedia — for the parent work.