Húyuè cūnsǒu yīàn 湖岳村叟醫案
Medical Casebook of the Old Villager of Hú and Yuè by 翟竹亭 Zhái Zhútíng (zì Zhútíng 竹亭, hào Húyuè cūnsǒu 湖岳村叟, b. 1875), of Qǐxiàn 杞縣 (Hénán).
About the work
A two-juǎn late-Qīng / Republican-period casebook by the eastern-Hénán physician Zhái Zhútíng, drawn from forty years of rural-practice experience and arranged into 17 disease-categories with 237 individual cases. The work is unusual among Republican-period casebooks in its principled attention to clinical failure and misdiagnosis — Zhái records his unsuccessful cases in detail alongside his successes, treating mistakes as primary pedagogical material. The thematic coverage is broad: internal medicine, external medicine, gynaecology, paediatrics, and especially dangerous epidemic conditions, which Zhái treated extensively in eastern Hénán’s rural pandemic environment. The hào “Húyuè cūnsǒu” (Old Villager of Hú [i.e. Lǐ Bīnhú 李瀕湖 = 李時珍] and Yuè [i.e. Zhāng Jǐngyuè 張景岳 = 張介賓]) records Zhái’s two principal Ming-period medical exemplars.
Prefaces
No preface is preserved in the hxwd source. The _001.txt file contains only the bibliographic header; the full text and editorial paratexts (the joint revisions by Zhái’s friends Wèi Guìsēn 衛桂森, Jiāng Jiāmò 江家謨, and Mèng Jìhóng 孟繼鴻, and the proof-reading by his disciples Chén Wényuán 陳文元 and Shī Hépǔ 史和璞, plus Zhāng Wénfù 張文甫 of Kāifēng Medical College’s 1963 lithographic-edition collation) are transmitted in the standard printed editions.
Abstract
Zhái Zhútíng 翟竹亭 (b. guāngxù yǐmǎo, 1875; death date undocumented but post-1958 — the original-manuscript revision by his friends preceded the 1963 Kāifēng lithographic printing), of Qǐxiàn 杞縣, Hénán. His ancestral home was Hóngdòng 洪洞 in Shānxī; in the early Hóngwǔ reign of the Míng his lineage was relocated to Qǐxiàn as part of the imperial population transfers, then moved to Dàzhài village in Chángyuán 長垣, Zhílì. In the Xiánfēng rénzǐ year (1852), the Yellow River breached at Tóngwǎxiāng 銅瓦廂 — one of the most consequential mid-nineteenth-century natural disasters in north China — and the family returned to Qǐxiàn and settled there. Zhái was thus born into a post-disaster rural environment in the most epidemic-prone region of late-Qīng north China.
At 16 he studied medicine under 尤憲庚 Yóu Xiàngēng, a Tōngxǔ-county physician practising at the Qǐxiàn City God Temple, who instructed him in pulse-theory and acupuncture. After five years he completed his apprenticeship and began independent practice. Despite never having attended a formal school, he was a serious autodidact, devoting particular attention to the Nèijīng, the Nánjīng, the JīnYuán physicians, and Míng-period Wú Yǒukě 吳又可 (吳有性, the Wēnyì lùn theorist). His two greatest scholarly debts — to Lǐ Bīnhú 李瀕湖 (李時珍, for the Běncǎo gāngmù tradition) and to Zhāng Jǐngyuè 張景岳 (張介賓, for the Lèijīng and Míng-orthodox internal-medicine tradition) — supplied his hào “Húyuè cūnsǒu” (Old Villager of Hú and Yuè).
After four decades of rural practice in Qǐxiàn, Zhái compiled the unusual cases he had treated into the present two-volume casebook. The text was jointly revised by his friends Wèi, Jiāng and Mèng, proof-read by his disciples Chén and Shī, and circulated in manuscript before being collated by Zhāng Wénfù 張文甫 of Kāifēng Medical College and printed as a small-format lithographic edition in 1963 with the support of the Kāifēng Prefectural Health Department. The composition window 1900–1958 brackets Zhái’s mature clinical practice through his final editorial revision.
The 237 cases cover seventeen disease-categories spanning internal medicine, gynaecology, paediatrics, and especially eastern-Hé-nán epidemic conditions. Each category opens with a general discussion of differential aetiology; each disease then carries a representative case with full biànzhèng / zhěnduàn / zhìfǎ (differentiation / diagnosis / treatment) narration. The text’s deliberate inclusion of unsuccessful cases and misdiagnosis lessons is its principal scholarly contribution and the principal reason it has been valued in modern Chinese-medical pedagogy.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language secondary literature located. The modern PRC reprint tradition (descending from the 1963 Kāifēng lithographic edition) is the principal scholarly channel; the work is anthologised in several modern yīàn collections.
Other points of interest
The candid record of clinical failures and misdiagnoses makes the Húyuè cūnsǒu yīàn a particularly important source for the historical study of late-Qīng / Republican-period rural medical practice in north China. The eastern-Hénán epidemic-disease cases are also valuable for the regional history of public health in the post-Tóngwǎxiāng (1852+) Yellow-River-disaster zone.