Hé Dànān yīàn 何澹安醫案
Medical Case Records of Hé Dànān by 何游 Hé Yóu 何游 (zì Dànān 澹安, mid-to-late Qīng physician of Jiāngnán, often grouped with the Yè Tiānshì 葉天士 lineage).
About the work
A single-juǎn clinical casebook of Hé Dànān, surviving in fragmentary form and transmitted only through manuscript copies in private medical libraries until the hxwd repatriation project. The cases are short, dense, and prescription-oriented, organised by syndrome type (the surviving opening section is on lèizhòng 類中 — “stroke-like” patterns — followed by sleep disturbance, gānyáng 肝陽 ascendance, xūláo 虛勞 etc.). Each entry gives a few lines of pulse-and-symptom description and the precise composition of the prescription. The clinical style — light dose prescriptions in the Sūzhōu Yè-school manner, heavy use of shúdì 熟地, fúshén 茯神, gānjú 甘菊, shíjuémíng 石決明, suānzǎorén 棗仁, bǎizǐ shuāng 柏子霜, and the gānyáng/qiányáng (suppressing-ascendant-yáng) framework — places the author firmly in the post-Yè Tiānshì Sūzhōu / Wúzhōng tradition of the early-to-mid nineteenth century.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt of this text contains no preface and opens directly with case records — the source file as preserved is internally headed only by syndrome rubrics (the first being “類中” lèizhòng). No formal preface is preserved in source.
Abstract
Hé Yóu 何游 (zì Dànān 澹安) was a Jiāngnán physician of the early-to-mid nineteenth century associated with the Sūzhōu / Wúzhōng post-Yè Tiānshì clinical school. His biographical data are thin: CBDB 263567 records his name without dates; he is conventionally identified with the Hé family of Ménghé 孟河 in Jiāngnán — one of the principal late-Qīng medical lineages, distinguished from but related to the Ménghé Fèi 費 and Mǎ 馬 families. Some sources identify him as the elder of the Hé brothers in this Ménghé Hé family (older brother of 何長治 Hé Chángzhì = Hé Shūtián 何書田, zì Hóngfáng 鴻舫, the more famous prolific Ménghé Hé family physician of the mid-nineteenth century); but the data are weak and not all modern reference works concur. The composition window 1820–1880 reflects the mid-nineteenth-century date range that the catalog meta and the internal stylistic data support.
The casebook is conventionally taken as evidence of the Ménghé tradition’s clinical signature at the moment of its consolidation as a recognised lineage in the Chángzhōu hinterland. The most influential modern treatment of the Ménghé tradition is the major monograph of Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland Press, 2007), which discusses the Hé family in detail.
Translations and research
Scheid, Volker. 2007. Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006. Eastland Press. — fundamental for the Ménghé context within which the Hé family operated.
No dedicated study of this particular casebook located in European languages.
Links
- The Ménghé Hé family is one of the four great Ménghé medical lineages (Fèi 費, Mǎ 馬, Cháo 巢, Hé 何) systematically reconstructed in Scheid 2007.
- Kanseki DB
- 何澹安醫案