王旭高臨證醫案

Wáng Xùgāo línzhèng yīàn 王旭高臨證醫案

Wáng Xùgāo’s Clinical Case Records by 王旭高 Wáng Xùgāo 王旭高 (= Wáng Tàilín 王泰林, hào Tuìsī jūshì 退思居士, 1798–1862), of Wúxī 無錫.

About the work

Four juǎn of clinical case records of Wáng Tàilín — the central nineteenth-century clinician of Wúxī — collected by his disciples and printed in their posthumous compilations alongside the Sìbù tóngshū 四部同書 of his teaching writings. The cases are characterised by their elegant prose, careful pulse-and-symptom statements, and the systematic deployment of Wáng’s famous zhì gān shífǎ 治肝十法 (“ten methods of treating the liver”) — the framework that made him one of the most influential late-Qīng theorists of liver-pathology and the prototype for Republican-era gānbìng 肝病 doctrine.

Prefaces

The hxwd _000.txt opens with an editor’s preface that begins with a historiographical claim about the yīàn genre: “Clinical case records are not ancient. The ancients did not formulate case-records when examining illness — they merely wrote out the prescription. From the Sòng establishment of the medical-learning kē 科 and the imperial examinations of physicians, with the high-scoring entered into the Tàiyī jú 太醫局, physicians henceforth came to write case-statements first and prescriptions after. But these were made and thrown away on the spot; no one compiled them. Like the cases of Xǔ Zhīkě 許知可 (許叔微) and Zhāng Jìmíng 張季明 (張杲) of the Sòng, of Xuē Lìzhāi 薛己, Chén Wéiyí 陳維宜, Sūn Wényuán 孫一奎 of the Míng, and of Yú Jiāyán 喻昌 and Xú Dàchūn 徐大椿 of the early dynasty — although they have casebook-style works, all are merely records of clinical successes set down in writing: their genre is jìshì 記事 (record of events), not línzhèng 臨證 (in-the-presence-of-clinical-practice) proper.” The preface then proposes that “the casebook is to medicine as the case-precedent (lìàn 例案) is to the jurist, and as the practice-essay (shìdú 試牘) is to the prose-writer” — programmatically positioning the late-Qīng casebook as a clinical-pedagogical document. The preface ends by characterising Wáng Tàilín’s clinical method (“if one can trace its pulse-and-symptom reasoning…”).

Abstract

Wáng Xùgāo 王旭高 (Wáng Tàilín 王泰林, hào Tuìsī jūshì 退思居士, 1798–1862) was the leading Wúxī physician of the mid-nineteenth century. He came from a shìrén 士人 family rather than a hereditary medical lineage, studied medicine after his uncle’s death from illness, and practised in Wúxī across the disturbed decades of the Tàipíng wars (his death-date 1862 coincides with the height of the Tàipíng war in the Jiāngnán region). He is best known for two distinct contributions: the systematic gānbìng 肝病 (liver-disorder) doctrine summarised in his Zhì gān shífǎ 治肝十法 (“ten methods for treating the liver” — shūgān 疏肝, qīnggān 清肝, xiègān 瀉肝, yǎnggān 養肝, etc.), which became the dominant nineteenth-century framework for liver-related pathology; and the major didactic work Wáng Xùgāo yīshū liùzhǒng 王旭高醫書六種 (a six-fold collection of teaching texts), of which the casebook here is one component. Pupil of 高錦庭 Gāo Jǐntíng (Gāo Bǐngjūn 高炳鈞) in the family-medicine tradition of Wúxī, Wáng was succeeded by 張聿青 Zhāng Yùqīng (1844–1905) as the leading Wúxī clinician.

The casebook was compiled by his disciples in the years immediately following his death and was first printed in 1865; the hxwd reprint follows a later nineteenth-century re-cutting. The composition window 1820–1862 reflects the period of Wáng’s mature clinical practice.

Translations and research

Scheid, Volker. 2007. Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006. Eastland Press. — for the Wúxī / Jiāng-nán late-Qīng context. Hinrichs and Barnes 2013, ch. 8.

Links

• See related Wúxī / Wáng-school catalog entries: KR3ep006 Zhāng Yùqīng yīàn.
• Kanseki DB
• 王旭高臨證醫案