Shěnshì yīàn 沈氏醫案
Medical Case Records of Mr Shěn [Lǔzhēn] by 沈璠 Shěn Fán 沈璠 (zì Lǔzhēn 魯珍, mid-Qīng physician).
About the work
A single-juǎn clinical casebook of the mid-Qīng physician Shěn Lǔzhēn 沈魯珍, whose name is given in the source preface as Lǔzhēn Shěnxiānshēng 魯珍沈先生. The cases are dominated by huòtán qīnghuǒ 豁痰清火 (phlegm-clearing-fire-cooling) prescriptions, which has led superficial readers to characterise his clinical style as biased toward cooling; but the preface vigorously defends Shěn’s approach, arguing that what looks like uniformity in the surviving cases is the editorial selection of the most theoretically demanding examples, with the everyday practice including the full classical clinical repertoire.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with a substantial preface: “On careful reading of the medical cases of Mr Shěn Lǔzhēn, the medicines used are mostly phlegm-clearing fire-cooling formulas in six or seven of every ten cases. Those who do not understand have wrongly criticised him as biased toward fire-cooling. They do not realise that the Master has had a great reputation for some forty years; his fully-saved [patients] surely number in the ten-thousands, and the recorded cases are surely not just this one juǎn. Where one should warm what is cool, or attack what is replete or supplement what is deficient, with each case striking the bone-and-tendon, he is past the easy ability to count. I, born late, have no way to peek at his full leopard-self — this is a matter of regret. Even on the basis of this one juǎn: the fire-cooling and phlegm-clearing items he deploys are all beyond ordinary intention, a cut above. What the common physician sees as deficient-cold, he uniquely sees with certainty as phlegm or fire or knotted-stagnation. Citing the Nèijīng, 朱震亨 Dānxī, and 李杲 Dōngyuán etc., he indicates the evidence with clarity, exhausts the causation to its origins, and makes the distinction between principal-disease and concomitant, distinguishes treating the manifestation and treating the root — with sequence undisturbed, detail-or-summary brilliantly clear, truly as if drinking the water of the Shàngchí 上池 and seeing through to the viscera and bowels…” The preface places Shěn squarely in the post-Dān-xī Jiāngnán synthesis.
Abstract
Shěn Fán 沈璠 (zì Lǔzhēn 魯珍; CBDB has multiple Shěn Fán records — 243314, 270217, 336233 — without securely matched dates) — mid-Qīng Jiāngnán physician. The internal evidence of the preface (“a great reputation for some forty years”) places his floruit conservatively in the early-to-mid eighteenth century (Yōngzhèng / early Qiánlóng). The composition window 1700–1760 reflects this. The work is preserved only in late-Qīng manuscript copies until the hxwd repatriation.
The principal documentary interest of the casebook is its clean illustration of the Dānxī-school qīnghuǒ huòtán 清火豁痰 clinical synthesis in its mid-Qīng Jiāngnán continuation. The preface’s defence of Shěn’s clinical style against critics who saw him as one-sided is itself a window into the late-eighteenth-century reception of Jiāngnán Dānxī inheritance.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. The work is treated briefly in modern Chinese surveys of Jiāng-nán Dān-xī tradition.
Links
- The Dānxī inheritance: see 朱震亨 and the Jīn-Yuán synthesis context.
- Kanseki DB
- 沈氏醫案