Wángshì yīàn 王氏醫案
Medical Case Records of Wáng (First Series) by 王士雄 Wáng Shìxióng (Mèngyīng 孟英, 1808–1868), of Hǎiníng 海寧 / Hángzhōu.
About the work
A two-juǎn casebook, the first of the Wángshì yīàn trilogy (followed by KR3ep084 Xùbiān and KR3ep085 Sānbiān), preserving Wáng Mèngyīng’s clinical practice from the 1830s and 1840s — his early-mature decades before the Tàipíng wars drove him to Shànghǎi.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries a Yángxù 楊序 by an unnamed Yáng-surnamed friend, who develops a sustained Mèng-zǐ-grounded argument on professional dedication and discusses his own medical education from XuēZhāng (Xuē Jǐ and Zhāng Jǐngyuè) through Yù Jiāyán and the Sūzhōu sìjiā — eventually arriving at Wáng Mèngyīng as the contemporary master. The preface explicitly identifies the writer as a Jiāngxī official who acquired his books “in Yǐsì 乙巳” (1845) “while serving as an official in Jiāngyòu” — providing a terminus ante quem of c. 1845–1850 for the casebook’s circulation.
Abstract
Wáng Shìxióng 王士雄 (Wáng Mèngyīng, 1808–1868) is the single most-cited late-Qīng physician and the principal late-Qīng wēnbìng school master. The present text is the first of his three principal casebooks and documents his clinical practice in pre-war Hángzhōu. The cases are chronologically arranged (as Lù Shìè would later complain in his 1921 topical rearrangement KR3ep078) and cover the full range of internal-medicine, gynaecological, and pediatric presentations of mid-nineteenth-century Hángzhōu clinical practice.
The clinical signature — light-and-decisive wēnbìng prescribing, rigorous xūshíhánrè (deficiency-excess-cold-heat) syndrome discrimination, strong polemical attacks on unreflective wēnbǔ (warming-tonifying) prescribing — defines the late-Qīng Wāng-school. The composition window 1830–1850 brackets the early-mature clinical period.
Translations and research
Hanson, Marta. 2011. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine. Routledge — substantial treatment of Wáng Mèngyīng. Hinrichs and Barnes 2013, pp. 224–226.