Kǒuchǐ lèiyào 口齒類要
Categorised Essentials of Oral and Dental Medicine by 薛己 Xuē Jǐ (1487–1559).
About the work
The foundational late-Míng treatise of Chinese oral and dental medicine, by the great imperial physician 薛己 Xuē Jǐ of Wúxiàn 吳縣. The work is a single juǎn organised under twelve numbered categorical headings: (1) jiǎnchún 繭唇 (cocoon-lip, i.e. exfoliative chronic cheilitis and lip-cancer), (2) kǒuchuāng 口瘡 (mouth-sores), (3) chǐtòng 齒痛 (toothache), (4) shézhèng 舌症 (tongue-disorders), (5) hóubì zhūzhèng 喉痹諸症 (throat-occlusion syndromes), (6) hóutòng 喉痛 (throat-pain, with the appended sub-section on rǔé 乳蛾 tonsillitis, xuányōng 懸癰 uvular abscess, and yángméichuāng 楊梅瘡 syphilitic mouth-and-throat lesions), (7) zhūgǔ dàogǔ fāgěng 諸骨稻穀發鯁 (bone- and grain-impaction in the throat), (8) zhūgěng zhòufǎ 諸鯁咒法 (incantations for impaction), (9) wùtūn shuǐzhì 誤吞水蛭 (accidental swallowing of leeches), (10) zhūchóng rùěr 諸蟲入耳 (insects in the ear), (11) shé rù qīqiào jí chóng yǎoshāng 蛇入七竅及蟲咬傷 (snake-and-insect injuries to the orifices), (12) nánnǚ tǐqì 男女體氣 (body-odour). Each category is presented as a zhìyàn 治驗 case-record series — typically a half-dozen named patient cases with their pulse-and-tongue findings, the diagnostic reasoning (always articulated in the language of 薛己’s Spleen-and-Stomach / Six-yīn / Eight-yīn formula-paradigm), the prescribed formula, and the outcome. The case-records are followed by an extensive appended formulary (Fùfāng bìngzhù 附方並注) containing more than seventy formulas with their indications.
Abstract
Kǒuchǐ lèiyào is one of the sixteen medical works of 薛己 Xuē Jǐ that together constitute the Xuēshì yīàn 薛氏醫案 (KR3e0070). The work is unsigned and undated internally in the digital edition consulted, but the jiàoyuè 校閱 colophon (附於卷末) is a jiājìng dīngwèi 嘉靖丁未 (1547) prefatory note by the medical student 郁貌 Yù Mào of Wújiāng 吳江, who records that “Lìzhāi wēng” 立齋翁 (薛己) had treated his uncle Zhīyán 芝岩 for chǐgēn fúzhǒng 齒根浮腫 (floating dental-root swelling) using Qīngwèi sǎn 清胃散 plus shānzhī 山梔 and xuánshēn 玄參 to immediate effect. The case-records of the body of the work include patients identified by office-titles ranging from zhōushǒu 州守 (prefect) to jìnshì 進士 to yúshǐ 御史; one case, the Wáng lìbù 王吏部 case in the qí-ai zǐ section, is identifiable as a Jiā-jìng-era figure. The composition window adopted here is therefore 1528 (ca. the start of Xuē Jǐ’s mature post-imperial-service Sūzhōu practice) to 1559 (Xuē’s death). The 1547 colophon establishes a firm terminus ante quem.
The work is the first systematic Chinese kǒuchǐ (oral-dental) monograph in the doxographic sense — earlier hóukǒu chǐ material had been transmitted only as scattered chapters of generalist bózōng 博綜 works (e.g. KR3e0006 Wàitái mìyào 外臺秘要 juǎn 22, KR3e0024 Shèngjì zǒnglù 聖濟總錄 juǎn 117–122). Xuē’s doctrinal contribution is the systematic reframing of oral-and-dental pathology under the spleen-and-stomach / kidney-water / liver-fire categories of his school: he insists that kǒuchuāng 口瘡 (mouth-sores) is not simply shàngjiāo shírè 上焦實熱 (upper-burner repletion-heat) to be treated by bitter-cold attack, but must be sub-classified into zhōngjiāo xūhán 中焦虛寒 (middle-burner vacuity-cold), xiàjiāo yīnhuǒ 下焦陰火 (lower-burner yīn-fire), and wúgēn zhī huǒ 無根之火 (rootless fire), with corresponding warm-and-tonify treatments (the Bāwèi wán 八味丸 and Liùwèi wán 六味丸 prescriptions are recurrently prescribed). The case-records consistently illustrate the iatrogenic consequences of bitter-cold attack-treatment in qì-vacuity and xuè-vacuity patients — a programmatic theme of the entire Xuēshì corpus.
The work is the principal source for late-Míng / Qīng oral and dental clinical practice. It was reprinted within the Xuēshì yīàn (the Sìkù quánshū edition under KR3e0070) and circulated independently as well; the present digital text (jicheng.tw / 漢學文典) follows the 1654 Shōō (承應) Japanese print held by the National Library of China. Its descriptive vocabulary for lip-cancer (jiǎnchún 繭唇), gingival cancer (yáyín fǔlàn 牙齦腐爛, tānxué 潭穴 i.e. deep ulcer-cavity), and tongue-cancer (shéjūn 舌菌) is the source-vocabulary for much subsequent literature, and the work is one of the principal evidentiary bases for the modern Chinese-medical claim that pre-modern Chinese medicine recognised and classified oral-cavity neoplasms.
Translations and research
No standalone Western-language translation located. The work is, however, treated as one of the canonical primary sources in:
- Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007), which discusses the 薛己 yī-àn tradition as a founding moment of the late-Míng case-record genre.
- T. J. Hinrichs and Linda Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard, 2013), passim, for the Xuē Jǐ school’s place in the late-Míng medical-school taxonomy.
- The Chinese-language secondary literature on Xuē Jǐ is large; the standard reprint of the Kǒuchǐ lèiyào is the Xuēshì yīàn edition in the Sìkù quánshū (and its modern punctuated re-edition, 北京：人民衛生出版社).
Other points of interest
The work is the canonical source for the term jiǎnchún 繭唇 (“cocoon-lip”) in Chinese medicine — Xuē’s opening section devotes a tightly-argued discussion to its differentiation from ordinary lip-cracking, and his case-records include patients in whom the lesion behaved aggressively and metastatically, consistent with what modern oncology classifies as lip squamous-cell carcinoma. The same section’s case-record of a shéjūn 舌菌 (tongue-mushroom = tongue carcinoma) patient is similarly a foundational descriptive locus.
Links
- 口齒類要 (jicheng.tw 漢學文典)
- Kanseki DB
- Xuēshì yīàn 薛氏醫案: KR3e0070