奇症彙

Qízhèng huì 奇症彙

Compendium of Strange Symptoms by 沈源 Shěn Yuán 沈源 (hào Bàoyuánzǐ 抱元子, mid-Qīng Chángshú 常熟 physician, descendant of the Chángshuǐ 長水 Shěn lineage).

About the work

An eight-juǎn compendium of unusual / paradoxical clinical presentations (qízhèng 奇症 — “strange symptoms”), each presented as a brief case-vignette with annotation explaining the rationale of its diagnosis and treatment within standard medical theory. This is one of the most important Qīng yīàn lèi 醫案類 anthology projects: not the casebook of a single physician but an editorial enterprise gathering “strange symptoms” from across the historical record and from the editor’s own clinical experience, deliberately framed as a demonstration that the most exotic clinical phenomena are explicable within the ordinary framework of Chinese medical theory (in the editor’s own programmatic phrase, “shōuluó qízhèng ér yǐ chánglǐ shì zhī” 蒐羅奇症而以常理釋之 — gathering strange symptoms and explaining them with ordinary principles).

Prefaces

The hxwd _000.txt opens with a preface by Qián Dūntáng 錢敦堂 of Dānghú 當湖, dated some twenty years before the compendium’s printing, characterising the editor: “The ancients are gone but what is undying is words, virtue, and accomplishments rated together — the shì 士 who is not a good prime-minister should be a good physician, and the records are vastly broad, the way in which Xuān-Qí [the Yellow Emperor and Qí Bó 岐伯] are made to extend life across the world. Bàoyuánzǐ is descended from the Chángshuǐ Shěns, talented and learned, fond of writing; he has plumbed the deep secrets of the Hé-Luò 河洛 originating mechanisms and the hidden treasures of Fú-Xī and the Duke of Zhōu and applied them one by one to medicine. Medicine has had its renowned families in every generation, each laying out its own theses to set up their doctrine, the volumes filling carts and propping up roofbeams; but Bàoyuánzǐ holds that ‘rather than entrust them to empty words, it is better to record them in the deep-cutting clarity of actual clinical cases’ — and so he has gathered the strange symptoms and explained them with ordinary principles, drawing from astronomy, geography, human affairs, and the various biological kinds, naming the result huì ‘compendium’ — a Pián [秦越人 Biǎn Què] and a Hán [韓康伯] or a Dǒng [董奉] of our time.” The editor — Qián Dūntáng’s brother-in-law — is recorded as having spent twenty years revising the work “or gaining material in the company of friends, or in the lone-lamp of a stormy night, even in food and dream”.

Abstract

Shěn Yuán 沈源 (hào Bàoyuánzǐ 抱元子, mid-Qīng) — Chángshú 常熟 (Jiāngsū) physician of the late eighteenth century. CBDB lists multiple Shěn Yuán records (33422, 198973, 296685, 331097, etc.) without confident dates for the relevant figure; the figure attested as the editor of the Qízhèng huì is conventionally dated to the late-Qiánlóng / early-Jiāqìng period (active c. 1770–1810). The work circulated only in manuscript until its first formal printing in the Jiāqìng era and was repeatedly reissued through the nineteenth century. It is the principal Qīng anthology of unusual clinical phenomena and a major source for the cultural-historical study of Chinese medical exoticism.

The work is organised by anatomical / functional class (head, eye, ear, nose, mouth, tongue, throat, breast, abdomen, limbs, bones, skin, zàngfǔ 臟腑, etc.) and gathers cases of singular presentations — abnormal sensations, paradoxical reactions to foods or drugs, lasting transformations of bodily function — drawn from sources as diverse as the Shǐjì biography of Chúnyú Yì 淳于意, the Yīshuō 醫說 of Zhāng Gǎo 張杲, Jiāng Guàn’s Míngyī lèiàn 名醫類案, and Shěn Yuán’s own clinical practice. Each case is followed by editorial commentary explicating the case in the framework of standard medical theory. The compendium is thus simultaneously a demonstration that classical Chinese medicine has the explanatory resources to handle exceptional phenomena and a major medical-cultural document of the strange.

Translations and research

No dedicated European-language monograph on this work located. The Qí-zhèng huì is treated incidentally in studies of the Chinese medical-strange genre; see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (UC Press, 1999) on the broader anthology tradition.

Links

• Modern Chinese edition: Rénmín Wèishēng Chūbǎnshè, 1956 (Wèi Jié 魏杰 et al. ed.); also Zhōngyī Gǔjí, 1990s.
• Kanseki DB
• 奇症彙