Xúpī Yè Tiānshì wǎnnián fāngàn zhēnběn 徐批葉天士晚年方案真本
The Authentic Late-Years Cases of Yè Tiānshì with Xú [Língtāi]‘s Annotations by 葉桂 Yè Guì 葉桂 (Tiānshì 天士, 1666–1745, cases) and 徐大椿 Xú Dàchūn 徐大椿 (Língtāi 靈胎, hào Xíxī 洄溪, 1693–1771, critical annotations).
About the work
A two-juǎn collection of Yè Tiānshì’s late clinical cases — characterised as “zhēnběn” 真本 (authentic redaction) by the eighteenth-century preface — to which Xú Dàchūn (1693–1771), the great Qīng critic of clinical medicine, added critical annotations (pī 批) that constitute one of the most important episodes of clinical commentary in the entire Qīng medical literature. Xú’s critical posture toward the Línzhèng zhǐnán yīàn KR3ep010 tradition — which he found doctrinally lax and editorially adulterated — makes his approbation of these cases especially significant: he treats them as genuinely from Yè’s late hand and as documenting Yè’s clinical thinking at its maturity. The annotations are pithy clinical evaluations, sometimes correcting Yè’s reasoning, sometimes praising the daring of a prescription, sometimes flagging where the prescription seems uncharacteristic of Yè and may have been distorted in copying.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with a long colophon (跋) tracing the work’s transmission. “Yèshì’s Línzhèng zhǐnán is current throughout the realm; every wielder of the Xuān-Qí art typically keeps a copy at home. But it is said that within it are many counterfeit tripods, that the conception and prescription-formulation occasionally bears criticism, and that it is in any case not the dìngběn 定本 (definitive edition) of the master’s lifetime.” The colophon-writer (one Zhènjiā 振家, a great-great-grandson of someone in the Yè circle) recounts: “Long ago when I roamed with Master Bèi 貝師, there were several pages of prescriptions in Yè’s own handwriting — the treatment methods miraculously fine, the calligraphy vigorous and antique. I heard that the master’s household still preserves a stored original passed down through six generations, never shown to outsiders — it is precisely the redaction that Xíxī [Xú Língtāi] critiqued. In the early Xiánfēng era, when the Cantonese rebels [the Tàipíng] disturbed Wúxià, the family fell on hard times and sold the great writing-trunks at market. Old paper choked the place, but on checking I found this book among them. I exchanged for it with a heavy fee and took it home, as if I had obtained the Persian Hóngbǎo. A single individual fled to Shànghǎi clutching the book… and now in the blink almost thirty years have passed; I too am grown old. If I should lose it in the end, would I not be the master’s criminal? The master’s great-great-grandson Nèrén 訥人 has earlier cut the Yīàn cúnzhēn 醫案存真 KR3ep079, but this book was not entirely included in that cutting — it was preserved as a family secret. Therefore I have entrusted my disciples to make a careful collation, that I may give it to the age.” This is one of the more touching colophons in the Qīng casebook literature.
Abstract
Yè Tiānshì (1666–1745) and Xú Dàchūn (1693–1771) are treated in their respective person notes; for the Yè biographical background see 葉桂 and for Xú see 徐大椿. Xú Dàchūn is the most authoritative early-Qīng critic of contemporary medical practice — his Yīxué yuánliú lùn 醫學源流論 (1757) is one of the most acid surveys of the failings of contemporary clinical Chinese medicine — and his approbation of these cases against the Línzhèng zhǐnán establishes a key piece of evidence for the textual history of Yè Tiānshì’s clinical record. The composition window 1730–1771 reflects Yè’s late practice as lower bound (the inclusion of cases described as wǎnnián 晚年 “of late years”) and Xú’s death-year as upper bound for the annotations.
The work was preserved as a family secret across six generations of the Yè family before being recovered by Zhènjiā in the disturbed Xiánfēng / Tóngzhì years and finally cut for public circulation in the late nineteenth century (some thirty years after the 1853–55 events described in the colophon, placing the public cutting in c. 1880s). The hxwd reprint follows this late-nineteenth-century printing.
Translations and research
For Xú Dàchūn see Paul U. Unschuld, Forgotten Traditions of Ancient Chinese Medicine (Paradigm, 1990) — translation of Xú’s Yī-xué yuán-liú lùn with extensive biographical and contextual matter. For Yè Tiānshì see Hanson 2011 and Hinrichs and Barnes 2013.
Links
- Related YèXú clinical dialogue: see also KR3ep087 Huíxī yīàn 洄溪醫案 (Xú’s own casebook).
- Kanseki DB
- 徐批葉天士晚年方案真本