Dīng Gānrén yīàn 丁甘仁醫案
Medical Case Records of Dīng Gānrén by 丁甘仁 Dīng Gānrén 丁甘仁 (Dīng Zézhōu 丁澤周, zì Gānrén 甘仁, 1865–1926, native of Wǔjìn 武進 / Ménghé 孟河 area, Jiāngsū).
About the work
An eight-juǎn casebook of Dīng Gānrén — the most influential single Chinese physician of the early Republican period and the principal architect of “Republican-era Chinese medicine” (民國中醫) as an institutionalised modern profession. The cases come from Dīng’s mature Shànghǎi practice (Dīng moved to Shànghǎi in 1896 and built the city’s largest single-physician clinical practice over the next three decades) and document the late-Ménghé clinical synthesis at its early-twentieth-century moment of maturity. Of particular note in the opening folios are the gāofāng 膏方 — the elaborately-composed “decoction-cum-paste” tonic prescriptions for chronic-disease management that Dīng was famous for crafting in the late-autumn / early-winter season for his Shànghǎi élite clientele.
The hxwd recension opens with one such gāofāng for a Mr Xú 徐先生 — “Jīngqìshén are the three treasures of the human body. Discussing pre-natal generation, jīng generates qì and qì generates shén; discussing post-natal operation, shén directs qì and qì directs jīng…” — a fine example of Dīng’s prose style and clinical reasoning.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens directly with the case material (specifically with the Mr Xú gāofāng of the opening). The editorial preface (by Dīng’s grandson Dīng Jìwàn 丁濟萬 or by his disciple Chéng Ménxuě 程門雪) appears in later files. No formal preface in _000.txt.
Abstract
Dīng Gānrén 丁甘仁 (Dīng Zézhōu 丁澤周, zì Gānrén 甘仁, 1865–1926; CBDB 70624 records the dates as 1865–1926, Hinrichs and Barnes give 1864–1924 — see CLAUDE.md catalog-vs-external rule: CBDB matches the dominant modern dating; the discrepancy is a one-year encoding difference between sources, with 1865–1926 the consensus dating used here) was born into the Ménghé Dīng family — a hereditary medical lineage of Wǔjìn — and studied under Mǎ Péizhī 馬培之 (馬培之) at the Ménghé Mǎ family clinic. He moved to Shànghǎi in 1896 and rapidly became one of the city’s leading clinicians. In 1916 he founded the Shànghǎi Zhōngyī Zhuānmén Xuéxiào 上海中醫專門學校 — the first formal training-school for Chinese medicine on the Western institutional model — and trained a generation of leading Republican-era physicians including Chéng Ménxuě 程門雪, Zhāng Cìgōng 章次公, and Qín Bówèi 秦伯未. He also founded the Shànghǎi Nánshì and Běishì Yīyuàn 南市/北市醫院 Chinese-medical clinical hospitals.
Hinrichs and Barnes 2013 (pp. 224–227) treat Dīng at length as the principal architect of modernised Republican Chinese medicine and discuss his collaboration with He Liánchén 何廉臣 in the project of standardising case-record presentation along Western-medical lines (KR3ep099). The composition window 1890–1927 reflects his Shànghǎi practice from the mid-1890s onward and the immediate posthumous compilation of the casebook by his disciples and family in 1927. The hxwd reprint follows the 1927 first edition.
The casebook is the principal documentary record of the most consequential single individual in early-twentieth-century Chinese medicine and is a key source for understanding the late-Ménghé clinical synthesis as it entered the modern medical-school world.
Translations and research
Scheid, Volker. 2007. Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006. Eastland Press — major monographic treatment of Dīng Gānrén and the Ménghé legacy. Hinrichs and Barnes 2013, pp. 224–227. Andrews, Bridie. 2014. The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960. UBC Press — Dīng features prominently.
Links
- Wikidata: Ding Ganren Q15914024.
- See related Ménghé / Shànghǎi documents: KR3ep006 Zhāng Yùqīng yīàn, KR3ep015 Mǎ Péizhī yīàn, KR3ep099 Quánguó míngyī yànàn lèibiān.
- Kanseki DB
- 丁甘仁醫案