Wàikē xuǎnyào 外科選要
Selected Essentials of External Medicine by 唐黌 (Táng Hóng, zì/hào Qínzhōu 芹洲, fl. Qiánlóng, 清) — an amateur rural physician of Kūnshān 崑山 (Jiāngsū).
About the work
A concise didactic distillation of the three great MíngQīng surgical compendia — Chén Shígōng’s KR3ek014 Wàikē zhèngzōng (1617), Qí Kūn’s KR3ek011 Wàikē dà chéng (1665), and Wáng Kěntáng’s KR3ek027 Yángyī zhǔnshéng (1608) — assembled in Qiánlóng 41 (1776) by Táng Hóng, a self-taught rural physician who organised his practice around the imperial KR3ek009 Yīzōng jīnjiàn and produced this beginner’s primer for non-specialists in his locality. The work is essentially a zhāiyào 摘要 (digest) rather than an original treatise, but is useful as documentation of the way the Yīzōng jīnjiàn’s surgical doctrine was being repackaged for lay rural networks in mid-Qián-lóng Jiāngnán.
Abstract
The Kanripo digitisation lacks the author’s own preface (which is preserved in the Wikisource and Jicheng-TCM transcripts) and offers instead a bǔyí fāng 補遺方 (supplementary-prescriptions) appendix at the head, mostly drawn from Xuē Jǐ’s Wàikē xīnfǎ (cf. KR3ek024) zhǒngkuì mén 腫潰門. Táng’s own preface explains that he was not formally trained, practised in remote villages following the imperial Yīzōng jīnjiàn surgical section, and abridged the three great compendia into a single accessible volume. The work has two juǎn; juǎn 1 sets out the theoretical framework — the scope of wàikē, diagnostics, yīnyáng differentiation, and a Yōngjū yuánwěi lùn 癰疽原委論 essay — while juǎn 2 presents named diseases (knife and fall trauma, fractures, dislocations, carbuncles, ulcers, scrofula, hemorrhoids), each with a brief discussion and a selection of formulae. The character is throughout heavily formulary.
The text is not in the Sìkù and has no major scholarly afterlife of its own, but is referenced in dictionaries of Chinese medical literature as a representative example of the diffusion of imperial wàikē doctrine into provincial medical practice. There is also a separate, larger Wàikē xuǎnyào in 6 juǎn by Xú Zhēnjiè 徐真銈 (1843), which should not be confused with the present 1776 work.
Translations and research
- 《中國醫學大成》 reprint, ed. Cáo Bǐng-zhāng 曹炳章, 1936.
- Jicheng TCM and ctext.org digital editions.
- No substantial Western-language scholarly literature located.