Jīnchuāng mìchuán jìnfāng 金瘡秘傳禁方
Forbidden Prescriptions for Wounds, Secretly Transmitted attributed to 劉基 Liú Jī (劉青田 / 劉國師).
About the work
A late-Míng wound-medicine manual close in framing, content, and formulary to KR3el001 Mìchuán Liú Bówēn jiācáng jiēgǔ jīnchuāng jìnfāng — to such an extent that the two are best understood as parallel witnesses of a single “Liú-Bówēn imperial-secret traumatology” pseudepigraphic stream rather than independent works. The text is a single juǎn (ca. 14 kB) covering acute wound-care, bone-setting (jiēgǔ), arrow-extraction, jīnchuāng (sword-cut and arrow-cut) treatment, dressing protocols, and supporting decoctions for upper-, middle-, and lower-body injuries. The signature 14-step Liú Guóshī jìnfāng protocol (wash → diagnose → traction → incise → align → fill with Hēilóng sǎn 黑龍散 → fill with Fēngliú sǎn 風流散 → splint → administer internal medicine → repeat as needed) is presented as the framework that organises the rest of the formulary.
Prefaces
The preface (untitled, undated) opens with the same rhetorical question as KR3el001 — why is the book called jìn “forbidden”? — and gives the same answer: not because it must not be transmitted, but because it issued from the cháotíng gōngjìn 朝廷宮禁 (the imperial Forbidden Precincts). The narrative thereafter is closely parallel to that of KR3el001: Tàizǔ 太祖 (朱元璋) personally faced arrows and stones on campaign and felt the wound-pain of his soldiers as his own; he therefore convened wandering specialists (including a 中山 figure, likely a reference to 徐達 Xú Dá, ennobled Zhōngshānwáng 中山王) who tested and verified prescriptions on the wounded; the verified prescriptions were registered in the palace as imperial-secret state-medicine. Liú Qīngtián 劉青田 (= 劉基 Liú Bówēn, who hailed from Qīngtián 青田) “participated in the great plans of state and army, sovereign and minister of one body,” and was permitted to retain a copy; thence “the descendants of a Wénwǔ Duke 文武公” — likely Liú Bówēn himself (whose posthumous title was Wénchéng 文成, a probable scribal slip or genre-stylisation for wénwǔ) — communicated some recipes to the compiler. The compiler explicitly notes the limited extent of his sample: “this is the beginning of the book’s transmission outside the palace, regrettably not the whole — only a few spots on the leopard’s pattern (bào wén zhī shù bān 豹文之數斑).”
Abstract
The work is pseudepigraphic. As with KR3el001, no medical compositions are recorded in Liú Jī’s standard bibliographies (Míng shǐ 128; Goodrich-Fang 1:932-938; Sìkù preface to KR4e0005; SBCK 《太師誠意伯劉文成公集》 KR4e0006). The “Liú Bówēn imperial-secret wound-medicine” stream is a late-Míng genre that affixed the founding-Míng strategist’s name to traumatology compilations of mixed lineage origin (cf. also KR3el008 Shàolín zhēnchuán shāngkē mìfāng, which performs the same trick with the Shàolín monastery’s prestige). The earliest internally-defensible date is the Xuāndé 2 (1427) preface of the parallel KR3el001 recension; the terminus ante quem is the Míng-Qīng transition (1644), since the framing rhetoric (“our reigning Tàizǔ Gāo huángdì 我朝太祖高皇帝”) presupposes the Míng dynasty. The composition window 1427–1644 is therefore adopted.
The systematic parallels with KR3el001 are striking and worth listing: (1) identical 14-step Liú Guóshī jìnfāng protocol; (2) the same dressing-trio Táohuā sǎn 桃花散 (haemostatic), Hēilóng sǎn 黑龍散 (anti-inflammatory closure), Fēngliú sǎn 風流散 (wound-filling); (3) the same head-to-foot organisation; (4) the same “five fatal signs” prognostic schema; (5) the same dramatic evisceration-management protocol (one assistant holds the protruding bowel, a second spits cold water in the patient’s face, the shock makes the bowel retract); (6) the same anaesthetic máyào 麻藥 recipes; (7) the same nomenclature for upper/middle/lower-body mòyào 末藥 powders. The textual relationship between the two is best characterised as either two recensions of a common archetype or a parent-and-daughter pair derived from a shared late-Míng military-tradition compilation that was never fixed in a single canonical recension. The KR-edition transmits the text via the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫善本古籍叢書 (漢學文典) re-print of an overseas-preserved manuscript.
Translations and research
- No standalone Western-language translation or monographic study located.
- For the genre context see Hinrichs and Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard, 2013), pp. 326–328 — situates the late-Míng military-tradition shāngkē compilations in the broader history of east-Asian traumatology.
- Modern reprint: 《海外回歸中醫善本古籍叢書》 (北京：人民衛生出版社), the principal vehicle through which the text has re-entered Chinese-language circulation.
Other points of interest
The text repeatedly cross-references its prescription numbers (“apply prescription no. X” — yòng dì-X-hào yào 用第X號藥), indicating that it was designed as a working clinical reference whose numbered prescription-list is supposed to be memorised separately. The same numbering convention appears in KR3el007 Jiāngshì shāngkēxué and KR3el017 Shāngkē fāngshū — strong evidence that the three texts share a common pedagogical workflow.