北山醫案

Běishān yīàn 北山醫案

Medical Case Records of Kitayama [Yūshōshi] by 北山友松子 Kitayama Yūshōshi 北山友松子 (1648–1719, also written Tansuí Yūshō 丹水友松), Japanese physician of the early Edo-period “return-to-antiquity” (kohōha 古方派) school.

About the work

A three-juǎn casebook of approximately fifty extended clinical narratives kept by Kitayama Yūshōshi at the close of the seventeenth century, transmitted as part of the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫古籍叢書 (hxwd) project that repatriated rare Chinese medical books preserved in Japanese collections. The case records are unusual in the yīàn 醫案 genre for their day-by-day, prescription-by-prescription documentation: each case opens with a dated pulse-diagnosis and pulse-rationale, lists the exact composition and dosage of the prescription, and then continues with morning-and-evening pulse re-readings, dose adjustments, and dialogical justifications (“Lǎorén yún…” 老人云 — “the master said…”) often over twenty to fifty consecutive days. The opening case appended in the front matter (“Dà Míng dúlì lǎorén yòngyào fāng” 附錄大明獨立老人用藥方) records the regimen prescribed by the émigré Míng Chán monk 獨立性易 Dúlì Xìngyì 獨立性易 (= 戴笠 Dài Lì 戴笠, 1596–1672) for a jaundiced elderly father — a key piece of evidence for the personal transmission of late-Míng Chinese medicine to Japan through the Ōbaku 黃檗 Buddhist channel.

Prefaces

The hxwd _000.txt opens directly with case records and does not preserve a self-contained author preface. The most substantial paratext is the long appended introductory case attributed to “Dúlì lǎorén” 獨立老人 — Dài Lì (1596–1672), a jǔrén of Hángzhōu who fled to Nagasaki in 1653 after the Míng collapse, took ordination under the Ōbaku patriarch 隱元隆琦 Yǐnyuán Lóngqí, and practised medicine in Japan; he was Kitayama Yūshōshi’s master. The case (treatment of an elderly jaundiced patient, organised as a day-by-day pulse-and-prescription log from the eighth-month eighth-day through the ninth-month, with extensive Q&A passages between Dúlì and his pupil) is the only formal preface-equivalent paratext: the subsequent juǎn proceed straight into Kitayama’s own cases.

Abstract

Kitayama Yūshōshi 北山友松子 (1648–1719), often given the Japanese reading Kitayama Yūshōshi but also written in Chinese-source bibliographies as Tansuí Yūshō 丹水友松 (the form used in the Huáng Zūnxiàn 黃遵憲 colophon to KR3ep002 《先哲醫話》, where his name is invoked as one of the patriarchs of the Japanese “return-to-antiquity” movement: “丹水友松號倡復古”), was the son of a Chinese émigré father and a Japanese mother, born in Nagasaki. He studied medicine directly under 戴笠 Dài Lì 戴笠 / Dúlì Xìngyì 獨立性易 in Nagasaki and later moved to Kyōto, where he became one of the most influential clinicians of the Genroku 元祿 era. He is conventionally credited — together with 名古屋玄醫 Nagoya Gen’i 名古屋玄醫 (1628–1696) and 後藤艮山 Gotō Konzan 後藤艮山 (1659–1733) — with founding the Japanese kohō 古方 (“ancient-formula”) school, which rejected the Jīn-Yuán Lǐ-Zhū 李朱 synthesis dominant in Edo medical education and returned to the prescriptions of 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s 張仲景 Shānghán lùn 傷寒論 as the authoritative basis of clinical practice. His teaching is largely transmitted through his disciples and through this casebook; he published no theoretical treatise in his own name. The composition window for the Yīàn is bounded below by the years of mature practice from c. 1690 onward and above by his death in 1719, with the bulk of the cases internally datable by their day-and-month headings to the 1690s-1710s. The text is preserved only in Japanese manuscript copies; it returned to Chinese circulation through the modern hxwd repatriation project. As clinical documentation of kohōha practice in its formative generation — directly attesting the personal-transmission link from émigré late-Míng physicians to Japanese reform medicine — the Běishān yīàn is an indispensable source.

Translations and research

No substantial European-language secondary literature located. The text is treated briefly in Japanese-language histories of kohōha medicine (Yakazu Dōmei 矢數道明 et al., Kinsei Kanpō ijinden 近世漢方醫人傳, Tōkyō: Meiji Shoin, 1969–1971) and in modern Chinese reprintings of the hxwd corpus; on the émigré-physician background see Marta Hanson, “Jesuits and Medicine in the Kangxi Court (1662–1722)”, Pacific Rim Report 43 (2007), and on the Ōbaku medical lineage see Helen Baroni, Ōbaku Zen: The Emergence of the Third Sect of Zen in Tokugawa Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000).

Links

• CBETA / DILA author authority — no dedicated entry; Kitayama Yūshōshi is treated in standard Japanese reference works on kohōha.
• Hinrichs and Barnes, Chinese Medicine and Healing, ch. 5 (the seventeenth-century origins of the casebook genre).
• Kanseki DB
• 北山醫案