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
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
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