Lǐzhōng yīàn 里中醫案
Local Medical Case Records by 李中梓 Lǐ Zhōngzǐ (Shìcái 士材 / Niàné 念莪, 1588–1655), of Yúnjiān 雲間 (Sōngjiāng / Shànghǎi).
About the work
A single-juǎn casebook of the late-Míng / early-Qīng Sōngjiāng (Yúnjiān 雲間) physician Lǐ Zhōngzǐ — one of the major late-Míng medical authors and the founder of the late-Míng Yúnjiān clinical lineage. The text opens with a preface signed by Lǐ himself.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries a zìxù signed Yúnjiān Lǐ Zhōngzǐ Shìcái fǔ shí 云間李中梓士材甫識. In the preface Lǐ Zhōngzǐ argues that medical-prescription is a question of jiǎnyuán (窮源, “investigating sources”) rather than mechanical rule-application: “if we glue ourselves to fixed prescriptions to respond to inexhaustible transformation, we have never yet seen this work.” His method is the integration of four data-channels: sè (colour observation), mài (pulse), zhèng (symptom complex), and wèn (questioning) — “carefully holding the four and cross-checking them.”
The preface cites 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s famous critique of slack contemporary practitioners (“In observing physicians of today, they are concerned with quick speech; meeting the patient for a moment, they decide the decoction”), and admits that the cases here selected are those “in which scarlet and purple are easily confused” — i.e., presentations where surface-similarity hides decisive doctrinal differences.
Abstract
Lǐ Zhōngzǐ 李中梓 (zì Shìcái 士材, hào Niàné 念莪), 1588–1655, native of Sōngjiāng 松江 (literary name Yúnjiān 雲間) — now Shànghǎi. He was one of the major late-Míng / early-Qīng medical authors, principally remembered for KR3ec064 Yīzōng bìdú 醫宗必讀 (Required-Reading for the Medical Lineage, 1637) and 診家正眼 Zhěnjiā zhèngyǎn (Correct Eye for Diagnosticians) — both subsequently canonical pedagogical texts in the Qīng medical curriculum.
The casebook is methodologically distinctive for its insistence on three-data-cross-checking (sèmàizhèng) and its open identification of contemporary diagnostic errors. The opening case (Gù Liùjí 顧六吉, chest-pain with vomiting and food-refusal) is a classic Lǐ Zhōngzǐ teaching specimen: a wénxué (scholarly literatus) suffering chest-pain with vomiting that for two years had been treated as a digestive issue, finally diagnosed by Lǐ as an emotional-aetiological condition rooted in suppressed anger, treated successfully through a combination of psychological and pharmacological methods.
The composition window 1620–1655 reflects Lǐ’s mature clinical decades through to his death. The text was widely re-printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located for the present text specifically. Lǐ Zhōngzǐ is generally discussed in Hinrichs and Barnes 2013, pp. 175–180.
Links
- Other Lǐ Zhōngzǐ works: KR3ec064 Yīzōng bìdú and others in KR3 (medicine division).
- Kanseki DB
- 里中醫案