Xiānzhé yīhuà 先哲醫話
Medical Discourses of the Former Worthies by 淺田宗伯 Asada Sōhaku 淺田宗伯 (1815–1894, formal name Asada Korotsune 淺田惟常, hào Ritsuen 慄園), Japanese physician of the late Edo and early Meiji periods.
About the work
A two-juǎn (上, 下) anthology of clinical maxims, case-fragments, and theoretical aperçus excerpted from the writings and oral teachings of thirteen Japanese kohō 古方-school physicians active from the Kyōhō 享保 / Genbun 元文 era (early eighteenth century) through the Bunsei 文政 era (early nineteenth century), with editorial commentary supplied by Asada Sōhaku. The opening juǎn is dominated by extracts from Gotō Konzan 後藤艮山 (1659–1733) — the patriarch of the Edo kohō synthesis — and proceeds through Kagawa Shūan 香川修庵, Yamawaki Tōyō 山脇東洋, Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞 (1702–1773), Nagatomi Dokushōan 永富獨嘯庵, and into the early nineteenth-century kōshō 考證-school figures (Taki Mototane 多紀茝庭 = Taki Genkin 丹波元胤, 1789–1827). The form is the Chinese yīhuà 醫話 (“medical discourse”) rather than the yīàn 醫案 case-record proper: each entry is a brief clinical observation or bon-mot with editorial cross-references (a Q&A reply, a comparative quotation from Xú Língtāi 徐靈胎 = 徐大椿, etc.), making it explicitly modelled — as Huáng Zūnxiàn’s 黃遵憲 colophon points out — on Zhào Yúnsōng’s 趙雲崧 Ōuběi shīhuà 甌北詩話 rather than on the medical-casebook tradition. The hxwd reprint preserves the 1879 Guāngxù 光緒 edition cut at Huáng Zūnxiàn’s instigation in Canton.
Prefaces
The _000.txt opens with three weighty paratexts. First is the colophon of Huáng Zūnxiàn 黃遵憲 (1848–1905) — the future late-Qīng diplomat-poet, then serving on the Chinese legation in Tōkyō — dated Dà Qīng Guāngxù wǔnián rùnzhēngyuè 大清光緒五年閏正月 (intercalary first month of 1879). Huáng frames the work as filling an unexampled lacuna in the Chinese medical tradition: although the imperially-commissioned Wényuān gé 文淵閣 lists ninety-seven medical works in 1,539 juǎn with a further ninety-four in 681 juǎn in the cúnmù 存目, “none of them has yet anthologised medical discussions into a huà-form work; the yīhuà genre truly begins with Sōhaku.” He sketches the Jīn-Yuán medical doctrines (the Héjì júfāng 和劑局方 dryness-and-heat orientation, Liú Shǒuzhēn 劉守真 = 劉完素 correcting it with cool-and-cold remedies, Zhāng Zǐhé 張子和 = 張從正’s sweat-vomit-purge trio, 李杲’s spleen consolidation, 朱震亨’s yīn enrichment, 張介賓’s yáng tonification) and reads the Japanese kohō movement as recovering the integrity of clinical practice from the partisan one-sidedness of the Jīn-Yuán schools. He records that “Japanese knowledge of Hàn medicine descends from Silla and Paekche, flourished in the Súi and Táng, and after the wide currency of the Lǐ-Zhū doctrines, Tansuí Yūshō 丹水友松 — 北山友松子 — first proposed the return-to-antiquity”: the colophon thus serves as a Chinese reader’s introduction to the entire kohō genealogy. The second paratext is a 1869 (Meiji 明治己巳) jottings-cum-postface by Imamura Ryō 今村亮, comparing Sōhaku’s anthology to gleaning after the great harvest of his earlier Kōkoku meii-den 皇國名醫傳 (Hide-and-Seek of the Eminent Physicians of the Imperial Realm). The third is a postface by Murayama Atsushi 村山淳 which compares the thirteen-figure framework to Zhào Yúnsōng’s Ōuběi shīhuà and emphasises the parity Sōhaku claims with Qīng-era Chinese medical authorities such as 尤怡 Yóu Yí (Jīnguì yì 金匱翼) and 徐大椿 Xú Língtāi (Yīxué yuánliú lùn 醫學源流論). A short note by his student Songshān Chéng 松山挺, on a personal copy presented for printing, closes the front matter.
Abstract
Asada Sōhaku 淺田宗伯 (Korotsune 惟常, hào Ritsuen 慄園, 1815–1894) was the most distinguished Japanese clinician of the bakufu-to-Meiji transition. Born in Shinano 信濃, he served as personal physician (奧醫師) to the late Tokugawa shogunate, attended the future Meiji Emperor’s family, and continued private practice into the Meiji era after the bakufu’s collapse, where his treatment of the Prince Imperial Yoshihito (future Taishō Emperor) made him nationally famous. He published more than thirty medical works including Kōkoku meii-den 皇國名醫傳, Shōkan ron benseki 傷寒論辨析, Zatsubyō ron 雜病論, and the Xiānzhé yīhuà.
The work was originally circulated in Japan from c. 1861; the colophon dates of 1869 (Imamura Ryō) and the Sōhaku biographical sketch establish that it had reached a stable form by the late Tokugawa / early Meiji transition. The 1879 Canton Guāngxù printing — produced at Huáng Zūnxiàn’s instigation while he was a junior counsellor in the Chinese legation in Tōkyō and Sōhaku had treated him personally — is the version through which it entered the late-Qīng Chinese medical world. The composition window 1861–1879 reflects the Japanese first circulation and the Canton printing respectively; the latter is the one through which the work was canonised in the late-Qīng yīhuà / yīàn corpus and the version repatriated under the hxwd project.
The work is the foundational text of the medical-huà genre proper in East Asia: as Huáng Zūnxiàn observes, “in medicine there are case-records (案) and there are discourses (話) — the former are like the legal àn of the magistrate, decisive and formula-bound, but the discourse is leisurely, ample, and enters into the heart deeply” (黃跋 ad loc.). The exact roster of the thirteen xiānzhé — Gotō Konzan 後藤艮山, Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞 (1702–1773), Yamawaki Tōyō 山脇東洋, Kagawa Shūan 香川修庵, Nagatomi Dokushōan 永富獨嘯庵, Yoshimasu Nangai 吉益南涯, Hara Nanyō 原南陽, Yamada Seichin 山田正珍, Taki Mototane 多紀茝庭, etc. — gives an authoritative editorial canonisation of the kohō movement at its first century of maturity. Huáng Zūnxiàn’s 1879 colophon is also an important text in its own right for the history of Chinese-Japanese medical exchange, attesting (as the late-Qīng diplomatic encounter with Japanese medicine begins) that kohō-school revaluation of Zhāng Zhòngjǐng could be read in Chinese-reform terms as a needed corrective to the Jīn-Yuán partisan inheritance.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located devoted specifically to the Xiānzhé yīhuà. On Asada Sōhaku’s career see Yakazu Dōmei 矢數道明, Kinsei Kanpō igaku-shi 近世漢方醫學史 (Meiji Shoin, 1971), and on the Huáng Zūnxiàn–Japan medical encounter see Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model (Harvard, 1981), pp. 100–110.
Other points of interest
The work is doubly important: as the canonising anthology of the Edo kohō movement, and as the textual interface through which late-Qīng Chinese physicians (via the Huáng Zūnxiàn edition) re-encountered the kohō re-reading of their own classical inheritance. Huáng’s colophon is one of the earliest substantial late-Qīng Chinese acknowledgements that Japanese medical scholarship had genuine claims on the home tradition.
Links
- Huáng Zūnxiàn — biography in Kamachi 1981.
- Asada Sōhaku biographical data in Yakazu Dōmei 矢數道明, Kinsei Kanpō ijinden 近世漢方醫人傳 (Meiji Shoin, 1969).
- Kanseki DB
- 先哲醫話