Sùpǔ yīàn 素圃醫案
Medical Case Records of [Zhèng] Sùpǔ by 鄭重光 Zhèng Zhòngguāng 鄭重光 (zì Zàixīn 在辛, hào Sùpǔ 素圃, 1638–1716; Xīnān 新安 physician).
About the work
A four-juǎn clinical casebook by the early-Qīng Xīnān physician Zhèng Sùpǔ — one of the foundational figures of the Xīnān 新安 (southern Ānhuī) medical tradition together with Wāng Jī 汪機 (汪機), Sūn Yīkuí 孫一奎 (孫一奎), and Wú Kūn 吳崑. The cases are notable for their thoroughness in clinical detail (lifelong follow-up of recurring patients), their explicit Shānghán lùn doctrinal stance, and their unusually fine writing. The opening of the hxwd _000.txt is a xù 序 (preface) of substantive biographical value.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with a substantial preface: “I have read the medical cases of Zhèng Sùpǔxiānshēng and deeply sigh at the greatness of his benevolent-cultivation accomplishment. The Master’s bodily experience is deep, hence his sight is uniquely sure; his clinical history is long, hence his trust is grounded in evidence. He has outstanding discernment, and yet he loves learning and thinks deeply; his heart understands the intentions [of the ancients]. Therefore in viewing a person’s illness he is no less than one who sees through a wall to one side: unless the person is fated to die and there is no remedy, the Master is never unable to make the patient rise up healed. He is now grown old, and unwilling to let the bitter pains of his lifetime go to waste, with all the real effectiveness of saved-and-revived patients, he has taken those that are particularly distinguished and clear, and brushed them as medical cases — truly enough to inspire trust in the present and transmit to the future, and to bequeath without end. I have heard that the Master’s medicine is no accident. In his early years he suffered the death of his honourable father, blaming himself as a son for not knowing medicine. Soon after he himself was struck by illness and suffered from the multitude of physicians who do not have pulse-thoroughness and who do not penetrate to the cause of yáng generation and yīn growth — unless they greatly contradict each other, they parrot the platitudes of Hú Guǎng’s middle-way, with wèidào 味道 [tasting-the-Way] equivocation; this led him deep into…” The preface establishes Zhèng’s biography (loss of father, self-experienced illness, autodidactic study, mature clinical practice in southern Ānhuī).
Abstract
Zhèng Zhòngguāng 鄭重光 (Sùpǔ 素圃, 1638–1716; CBDB 493426 / 502242 — name attested without dates) — Xīnān physician of the early Qīng, contemporary of Yú Jiāyán 喻昌 (喻昌) and Zhāng Lù 張璐, native of Shè 歙 (Ānhuī). He came to medicine through the conventional autodidactic-after-personal-loss trajectory described in the preface above. His clinical synthesis is Shānghán-doctrinal — strongly aligned with the early-Qīng Shānghán commentary tradition of Zhāng Lù, Yú Jiāyán, and Kē Qín 柯琴 — and stands as one of the principal Xīnān contributions to the early-Qīng Shānghán revival.
His other principal works are the Sùpǔ shānghán lùn lǐzhōng 素圃傷寒論理中 (lost), Wēnyì lùn bǔzhù 溫疫論補注 (an annotated supplement to Wú Yǒuxìng’s Wēnyì lùn — a key transitional text in wēnyì / wēnbìng studies), and the present casebook. The casebook was probably compiled in his old age (after c. 1700) and published shortly before or after his death in 1716. The composition window 1680–1716 reflects his mature clinical decades through to his death year.
The work is one of the principal early-Qīng Xīnān casebooks and an important documentary source for the Shānghán school in the southern Ānhuī region.
Translations and research
For Zhèng Sùpǔ in relation to the Wēn-yì lùn commentary tradition see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011). For the Xīn-ān context see Hinrichs and Barnes 2013, ch. 6.
Links
- Modern Chinese edition: Zhèng Sùpǔ, Sùpǔ yīàn, in Xīnān yījí cóngkān 新安醫籍叢刊, 1991.
- Kanseki DB
- 素圃醫案