Xǔshì yīàn 許氏醫案
Medical Case Records of Mr Xǔ [Ēnpǔ] by 許恩普 Xǔ Ēnpǔ 許恩普 (late-Qīng Běijīng physician of the bureaucratic elite, active c. 1880s–1900s).
About the work
A single-juǎn clinical casebook of the late-Qīng Běijīng physician Xǔ Ēnpǔ. The cases are presented as discrete, dated, named-patient episodes (the opening case is dated jǐchǒu 己丑 — 1889 — and involves Hú Dàiqīng 胡貸青 of the Capital District, Jīngjī Dào 京畿道); a high proportion of the patients are high-ranking Qīng officials and their families. This makes the casebook one of the most direct sources for the medical care of the late-Qīng bureaucratic elite. The clinical method draws heavily on classical Shānghán and warm-disease doctrine, but the diagnostic moves are distinctive — e.g. testing for residual heat by rubbing ginger on the tongue to see whether the black coating clears (in the opening case).
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt of this text contains no preface and opens directly with case records. The first dated case begins: “In the jǐchǒu 己丑 year [1889], the Capital District [official] Hú Dàiqīng 胡貸青 was severely ill; I was invited to consult. The tongue was black, the patient delirious and unconscious. The physicians all took it for a solid-heat solid-bind and proposed the Dàchéngqì tāng. My pulse-reading showed expansive but without strength, no thirst; further rubbing the tongue with a slice of ginger made it pale — symptoms similar to shānghán had transformed into deficiency-heat. I prescribed Rénshēnzhúyèshígāo tāng. One dose took immediate effect; with a few modifications he was healed. After a month or so the tongue shed a husk like zhǐké 枳殼 — the so-called ‘iron-armour tongue’ (tiějiǎ shé 銕甲舌) of the ‘sixty-sample-tongue’ tradition — a sign of yīn depletion. Had the symptoms not been discriminated as deficient-or-replete, life-and-death would have been a hand-turn.” The casebook proceeds in this annalistic-and-medical mode. No formal preface is preserved in source.
Abstract
Xǔ Ēnpǔ 許恩普 was a Běijīng physician of the bureaucratic elite, active in the late Qīng — the internal-evidence dating from the cases (jǐchǒu 己丑 = 1889 in the opening case) anchors his floruit to the Guāngxù 光緒 era, c. 1880s–1900s. Beyond the catalog meta entry the biographical data are thin: he has no CBDB entry, and his work is preserved only in late-Qīng / early-Republican manuscript copies and in the hxwd reprint. The casebook’s principal interest is documentary: it preserves the names, illnesses, and medical treatments of named high-ranking officials of the Qīng capital, including officials of the Gōngbù 工部 and the Jīngjī Dào 京畿道 administration.
The clinical method is conservative-classical: heavy reliance on Shānghán lùn prescriptions, careful pulse-and-tongue diagnosis, attention to the differentiation of true and false heat-or-cold. The “iron-armour tongue” episode (the tiějiǎ shé / liùshí yàng shé tradition) shows Xǔ working within the shéjiàn 舌鑑 (tongue-mirror) classification tradition that descended from the Áoshì shānghán jīnjìnglù 敖氏傷寒金鏡錄 and was elaborated in Qīng tongue-atlas manuals.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. The casebook is treated briefly in modern Chinese surveys of late-Qīng jīng-shī 京師 (capital) medical practice.
Links
- The tongue-atlas tradition behind the tiějiǎ shé identification is treated in Hsu, Elisabeth, Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine (Cambridge UP, 2010).
- Kanseki DB
- 許氏醫案