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白喉全生集

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Text ID
KR3em027
Date
1860–1882
Dynasty
清

Báihóu quánshēng jí 白喉全生集

Complete-Survival Compendium on White-Throat (Diphtheria) by 李紀方 Lǐ Jìfāng (zì Lúnqīng 倫青, of Héngshān 衡山).

About the work

A late-Qīng monograph dedicated to the diagnosis and treatment of báihóu 白喉 (“white-throat”) — the condition that the modern medical vocabulary identifies, with the proviso of historical inexactness, as diphtheria. The work is structured around a single principal doctrinal claim: that “white-throat” is not, as the standard mid-19th-century shíyī 時醫 (“contemporary physicians”) had come to assume, a purely epidemic-pestilence (yì 疫) condition to be treated uniformly with cooling drugs, but a syndrome admitting of both hán 寒 (cold) and rè 熱 (heat) varieties, each further divisible into light, heavy, depleted, and replete sub-forms. Lǐ’s fánlì 凡例 (general guidelines) and báihóu zhèng lùn 白喉證論 (theoretical chapter) lay out the hán/ rè / hánrè cuòzá 寒熱錯雜 (cold/hot/mixed) three-grand-rubrics framework, the diagnostic procedure (biàn zhèng fǎ 辯證法), insufflation powders, opening-the-pass (kāiguān 開關) techniques, dressings, and needling at the standard hand-acupoints (shǎoshāng 少商, shāngyáng 商陽, zhōngchōng 中衝, guānchōng 關衝, shǎochōng 少衝, jiáchē 頰車, hégǔ 合谷, qūchí 曲池). A prescriptions section provides the quánshēng (complete-survival) decoctions and powders organised by the same three-grand-rubric architecture.

Prefaces

The author’s self-preface (zì xù 自敘), dated Guāngxù 8 rénwǔ 壬午 winter (1882) and signed “Lǐ Jìfāng Lúnqīngshì at the Lóngmén Shānfáng 龍門山房 of Héngshān 衡山”, reports that his maternal grandfather, xiān wàizǔ 尹慎徽 Yǐn Shènhuī, was a learned generalist who “particularly excelled in the Qí–Huáng art”. Lǐ studied with him for over twenty years, “diligently inquiring into internal medicine, external medicine, laryngology, and tumours”. On the testimony of his clinical experience and of his grandfather’s transmitted prescriptions, he and his cousin 趙仲標 Zhào Zhòngbiāo compiled the present work, taking “hán and rè as the master rubrics and within each distinguishing light/heavy/depleted/replete”. The fánlì underscore that “white-throat has many heat-conditions and fewer cold-conditions; but its cold-conditions are not absent, and its heat-conditions are not without toxin. Contemporary physicians treat it uniformly as pestilence and apply cooling drugs across the board — and so kill innumerably.”

Abstract

Báihóu quánshēng jí is one of the most important late-Qīng monographs on diphtheria and a landmark in the Chinese medical response to the 19th-century epidemics of the disease which, as Hinrichs and Barnes note (Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, Harvard 2013, pp. 343–345), swept not only the British colonies and Europe and America but also China at mid-century; one Chinese diphtheria powder circulated as a Chinese-medical export and was the subject of the much-discussed 1874 Victoria-Parliament trial of the herbalist Ah Sue. Lǐ Jìfāng’s intervention is doctrinal as much as therapeutic: he argues against the contemporary tendency of shíyī to identify báihóu with yì (pestilence) and to apply cooling drugs uniformly, and insists on a zhèngmài 證脈 (sign-and-pulse) procedure that admits both cold and heat varieties and treats each on its merits. The composition window — set here at 1860 to 1882 — reflects the author’s reported “two decades of clinical inquiry” preceding the 1882 preface; the terminus ante quem is the Guāngxù 8 self-preface.

Lǐ Jìfāng, zì Lúnqīng 倫青, was a Húnán physician of Héngshān, working in the Lóngmén Shānfáng 龍門山房 study; he is not recorded in CBDB and his life-dates are not securely fixed in the standard biographical references. He cites his maternal grandfather 尹慎徽 Yǐn Shènhuī as his teacher and his cousin 趙仲標 Zhào Zhòngbiāo as his co-compiler.

Translations and research

  • No standalone Western-language translation of this work located.
  • For the broader history of Chinese-medical response to 19th-century diphtheria epidemics, see Hinrichs and Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard, 2013), pp. 343–345 (“Trialing Chinese Medicine in Colonial Australia”, Rey Tiquia). Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC, 2014), discusses the late-Qīng báihóu literature as a case of indigenous-medical doctrinal mobilisation against a new infectious-disease challenge.
  • Modern reprint via the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī shànběn gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫善本古籍叢書; also reprinted in modern collated medical-classics series.

Other points of interest

The work’s insistence — repeated several times in the fánlì and zhènglùn — that “more die of báihóu from misdiagnosis of cold as heat than from the disease itself” is a striking specimen of late-Qīng evidence-based clinical critique, and the methodological scaffolding (xiān píng zhèng, hòu cān zhī yǐ mài 先憑證後參之以脈) is a clean restatement of the priority of clinical signs over pulse-reading in acute-infectious medicine.

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