Chén Liánfǎng yīàn 陳蓮舫醫案
Medical Case Records of Chén Lián-fǎng by 陳蓮舫 Chén Liánfǎng (Chén Bǐngjūn 陳秉鈞, 1837–1914), of Qīngpǔ 青浦 (Jiāngsū / now Shànghǎi).
About the work
A three-juǎn casebook of one of the most prominent late-Qīng JiāngZhè physicians, Chén Liánfǎng — court physician to the Guāngxù emperor (徵召入京) and a key figure in the Shànghǎi medical milieu of the foreign-concession period. The hxwd source preserves the body of cases without a transmitted formal preface (the _000.txt file is absent in this hxwd subset; the source opens directly into the case material in _001.txt).
Prefaces
No transmitted preface in the hxwd source.
Abstract
Chén Liánfǎng (1837–1914), zì Bǐngjūn 秉鈞, hào Liánfǎng 蓮舫, was the nineteenth-generation descendant of a hereditary medical family of Qīngpǔ (now a district of Shànghǎi). He was repeatedly summoned to Beijing in the 1890s–1900s to attend the Cíxǐ Empress Dowager and the Guāngxù emperor, an experience that gave him court-physician status and a national reputation. From the 1890s he was a fixture of Shànghǎi clinical practice, contemporary with 費繩甫 Fèi Shéngfǔ (KR3ep050) and 丁甘仁 Dīng Gānrén (KR3ep024) and 曹穎甫 Cáo Yǐngfǔ (1866–1937).
The casebook is arranged by syndrome and preserves Chén’s signature moderate-warming, smooth-and-pacifying prescribing style — a softening of the Ménghé warm-disease orientation toward a more inclusive synthesis with the mid-Qīng Pǔjì / Sūzhōu lineages. The 1880–1914 bracket reflects his mature clinical decades.
Chén Liánfǎng was also one of the early advocates of formal Chinese-medical institutional reform in late-Qīng and Republican Shànghǎi, helping to organise medical schools and societies. His clinical reputation made the yīàn a heavily-copied text in the Republican period.
Translations and research
Scheid, Volker. 2007. Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006. Eastland Press — references Chén in the Méng-hé / Shàng-hǎi context. Hinrichs and Barnes 2013, pp. 220–227.
Links
- Contemporary Shànghǎi casebooks: KR3ep024 Dīng Gānrén yīàn, KR3ep050 Fèi Shéngfǔ xiānshēng yīàn, KR3ep006 Zhāng Yùqīng yīàn.
- Kanseki DB
- 陳蓮舫醫案