Zhěnyú jǔyú lù 診餘舉隅錄
Record of Outline Cases from Spare-Time Consultations by 陳匊生 Chén Jūshēng 陳匊生 (late-Qīng physician).
About the work
A two-juǎn casebook of selected clinical “outline” cases (jǔyú 舉隅 — to “raise a corner” so as to imply the other three, in the Lúnyǔ idiom; the title is a modest self-deprecation framing the work as a fragmentary sketch rather than a full case-record archive). The opening of the hxwd _000.txt is a substantial preface by Chén Shùrěn 陳述忍 of the same Chén family, in the elegant parallel-prose style characteristic of the late-Qīng provincial-literati medical preface, which celebrates the author’s scholarly attainments and the editorial decision to print the cases.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with Chén xù 陳敘 (Chén family preface): “My kinsman Jūshēng, with the talent to govern the realm, holds firm to the family-transmitted learning. In examining the pulse he checks the pivot-and-bolt; in his art he has received the qígāi 奇胲 [unusual / esoteric techniques]. In the bounds-and-fences of a single locality, people compete to drink the water from his upper pool; in the months he turns out a thousand axles, never privately holding back the books of arcane essentials. He holds that the Yìfǔ 意旉 [reference to Chúnyú Yì 淳于意 of the Hàn] of the Two Hàn was originally no genuine history; that the Sānjiā Yújiǎo 三家俞矯 are mere allegorical assertion; that the doubt-resolving of Dānxī 朱震亨 still went against the underlying tōngyuán 通元 intention; that the Gāoyáng pseudepigraphic ascriptions ate away at the genuine inheritance of Shūhé 王叔和. None of these came from his own hand; who alone has set forth his own heart-attained understandings? Thus he assembles the threads of past traces and brightly displays them to the future; in every appropriate point of taking-pulse and prescribing-medicine, in every distinction of purging-down and warming-the-middle, he never fails to grasp the originating essentials and dissect the smallest particles. From the words of cloth-silk-bean-grain he extracts the meaning of the Jīnguì yùjī 金匱玉機, and so unfolds the famous principles, opens and guides the foolish and ignorant. Take a single corner [as an example], and all three reflect. Setting it down on pear and date [i.e. cutting it to print] is his plan for serving the world…”
Abstract
Chén Jūshēng 陳匊生 (alternative reading Chén Juéshēng 陳匊生 with 匊 = 掬 jū “to scoop with both hands”) was a late-Qīng physician, kinsman of the preface-writer Chén Shùrěn 陳述忍 and member of a literati family with a transmitted medical practice. CBDB has no entry under this name. The conventional dating places him in the Tóngzhì / Guāngxù era (1860s–1890s). The composition window 1860–1900 is conventional rather than precisely datable. The work circulated only in manuscript / limited print until repatriated through the hxwd project.
The work is a minor but representative late-Qīng provincial-literati casebook in the standard genre framework: classical clinical reasoning, balanced prescriptions, attention to the differentiation of xū and shí and of hán and rè. The principal documentary interest is the substantial parallel-prose preface, which is a fine specimen of late-Qīng literati medical writing in its concentrated allusion to the HànWèi medical genealogy.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located.
Links
- The parallel-prose preface form is a hallmark of late-Qīng provincial-literati medical writing.
- Kanseki DB
- 診餘舉隅錄