Jiùshāng mìzhǐ 救傷秘旨
Secret Essentials on Saving the Injured by 趙蘭亭 Zhào Lántíng (撰) — gathered and compiled. Edited and underwritten for publication by 管頌聲 Guǎn Sòngshēng (zì Gēngtáng 賡堂). Prefaced by 黃鐎 Huáng Jiāo of Cāngxī 蒼溪.
About the work
A single-juǎn mid-Qīng shāngkē (traumatology) manual gathered by 趙蘭亭 Zhào Lántíng, a Tiāntāi 天台 (Zhèjiāng) practitioner active in the early-Xiánfēng period, on the basis of decades of personal field-collection from itinerant jìjīzhī jiā 技擊之家 (martial-arts traumatology lineage-houses) across the Yangtze region. Underwritten and published by his Huángyán 黃岩 friend 管頌聲 Guǎn Sòngshēng (zì Gēngtáng 賡堂) in Xiánfēng 2 (1852), with a 1851-dated preface by 黃鐎 Huáng Jiāo of Cāngxī 蒼溪. The published edition bound together with the work a separate woodblock of KR3el010 Diēsǔn miàofāng (the 1836 Gāoyóu Sūnshì 高郵孫氏 = 孫應科 Sūn Yìngkē reprint of the Míng-period 異遠真人 Yìyuǎn Zhēnrén original), so that the two complementary traumatology classics could circulate together in Zhèjiāng.
Prefaces
The 漢學文典 recension preserves both prefatory pieces:
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Guǎn xù 管序 (preface by Guǎn Sòngshēng, dated Xiánfēng 2 / rénzǐ 壬子 = 1852, Mid-Autumn third day): explains that the Diēdǎ sǔnshāng prescriptions had long been a closely held secret of the jìjījiā martial-arts lineages — “in a moment of disaster one is held at the breath, but if a man cannot find the right treatment, his life is forfeit.” His friend Zhào Lántíng of Tiāntāi had travelled in the Wú-Chǔ region collecting good prescriptions, “not keeping them secret, but seeking to relieve the world.” Their mutual friend 黃雲海 Huáng Yúnhǎi had written the preface for the volume — which Guǎn now undertakes to publish. The text further explains that Zhào subsequently produced a manuscript of the Diēsǔn fāng (clearly = the Yìyuǎn Zhēnrén → Sūn Yìngkē Diēsǔn miàofāng of 1836), “of Gāoyóu Sūnshì transmission, a rare book indeed; but Gāoyóu is more than a thousand lǐ from our home district, and copies of the printed edition are hard to get. Now I bind it with this one in publication to broaden the transmission.”
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Huáng xù 黃序 (preface by 黃鐎 Huáng Jiāo of Cāngxī 蒼溪, dated Xiánfēng 1 / first month of summer = 1851): a longer literary preface emphasising the importance of traumatology to both military and civilian life (“the gentleman dares not damage his body and hair, but in serving the king on the battlefield, even the wise and brave general cannot avoid wounds; an untreated wound is fatal, a treated one saves the man — the man’s life is the kingdom’s reliance”). Records that Zhào Lántíng had also travelled to Wǔchāng to learn the Western smallpox-vaccination technique (xīyáng zhòngdòu zhī fǎ 西洋種痘之法) and returned to disseminate it freely in Tiāntāi, “so that children’s smallpox no longer killed.”
Abstract
The work is firmly dated by both prefaces to 1851–1852 (Xiánfēng 1–2). The composition date adopted here is the bracket 1851–1852; the editio princeps is 1852.
The text proceeds in continuous prose without juan division: a Zǒnglùn 總論 opening section on the liùmài gānglǐng 六脈綱領 (the six fundamental pulse-qualities — fú 浮, chén 沉, chí 遲, shù 數, huá 滑, sè 澀 — and their derivative qualities) followed by site-by-site treatment protocols and an extensive formulary. The pharmacopoeia is firmly in the late-Qīng xuèyū lùn 血瘀論 blood-stasis tradition of 王清任 Wáng Qīngrèn (1768–1831), with substantial huóxuè huàyū 活血化瘀 (blood-quickening / stasis-resolving) drugs (táorén, hónghuā, dāngguī wěi, chìsháo, sūmù, liújìnú, gǔsuìbǔ).
The work’s principal innovation is methodological: Zhào Lántíng explicitly broke with the mìcáng 秘藏 (close-keeping) tradition of the martial-arts lineage-houses and openly published the prescriptions he had collected from them. This is in striking contrast to the parallel underground manuscript tradition (cf. KR3el001, KR3el003, KR3el008, KR3el012, KR3ee051) — and reflects a mid-19th-century shift in attitude in the Jiāng-Zhè medical-charitable circle (shàntáng 善堂 movement) toward freely disseminating practical medical knowledge.
Zhào’s parallel biographical role — disseminator of European smallpox vaccination in Tiāntāi — places him in the small but well-documented circle of mid-19th-century Zhèjiāng village-physicians who served as intermediaries between Western missionary medicine and Chinese rural practice.
Translations and research
- No standalone Western-language translation of the complete text located.
- 韋以宗 (ed.), 《少林寺武術傷科秘方集釋》, 北京：人民衛生出版社, 2008 — includes a punctuated annotated edition of the Jiùshāng mìzhǐ.
- For the parallel Zhèjiāng smallpox-vaccination context see Chia-feng Chang, “Aspects of Smallpox and its Significance in Chinese History,” PhD thesis, SOAS, 1996; and Angela Ki Che Leung, Leprosy in China: A History (Columbia, 2009), on the Jiāng-Zhè shàntáng movement and its medical-charitable practice.
Other points of interest
The simultaneous binding of KR3el014 with KR3el010 in the 1852 Huángyán edition is one of the better-documented mid-Qīng cases of a regional publishing combine assembling a “traumatology canon” for local use. The choice to pair Zhào Lántíng’s contemporary collection with the Míng-period Yìyuǎn Zhēnrén classic — the latter then sixteen years past its first printing — reflects the publishers’ wish to give their region (Huángyán, Tiāntāi) a self-contained traumatology corpus.