Téngshì yītán 藤氏醫談
Medical Discussions of the Fujii Family by 近藤明 Kondō Akira 近藤明 (zì Takamasa / 隆昌 Lóngchāng), a hereditary Japanese physician of the Edo period, with the dated postface signed Kyōwa rénxū dōng, Kondō Lóngchāng zhì 享和壬戌冬近藤隆昌志 (winter of Kyōwa 2 = 1802).
About the work
A two-juǎn (卷上 / 卷下) Japanese yītán 醫談 — “medical discussions” — written by Kondō Akira at the close of the eighteenth century in Chinese. The work is unusual in that it stakes out an explicitly anti-partisan position within Edo medicine. Where the dominant kohō 古方 (return-to-antiquity) school then ascendant in Kyōto and Edo had collapsed all medicine to 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Shānghán lùn 傷寒論 and declared the JīnYuán synthesis (劉完素 Liú Wánsù — 李杲 Lǐ Gǎo — 朱震亨 Zhū Zhènhēng) a corruption, Kondō argues that the two corpora address different classes of illness — external-pathogen (外感) disease being the proper domain of Zhòngjǐng, internal-injury (內因) disease the domain of LǐZhū — and that neither can be safely discarded. The opening juǎn contains substantial discussions of wēnyì 溫疫 (epidemic febrile disease) closely engaged with 吳又可 Wú Yòukě’s Wēnyì lùn 瘟疫論; of the distinction between bǔ 補 (“filling-and-tuning”) and yǎng 養 (“nourishing”); of the place of the Língshū / Sùwèn corpus in clinical practice; and of left-right partition of the body in clinical reasoning. The lower juǎn assembles discrete clinical-theoretical essays on cold-damage (傷寒), epidemic disease (時疫), dysentery (痢疾), foot-qì (腳氣), and consumptive disorders (虛勞), each pairing classical citation with the author’s own recipe-list.
Prefaces
The _000.txt preserves a self-deprecating author postface dated Kyōwa rénxū dōng 享和壬戌冬 (“winter of Kyōwa 2 = 1802”) signed Kondō Lóngchāng zhì 近藤隆昌志, in which the author disclaims any ambition either to establish a new norm in medicine or to serve as a primer for beginners, presenting the work merely as the record of “daily medical discussions” (平日醫談).
Abstract
Internal evidence places the work firmly in the late-Edo kohōha vs. gosei (古方 / 後世) controversy as it had played out by the turn of the nineteenth century. Kondō names and engages with the Japanese kohō patriarchs 後藤艮山 Gotō Konzan, 香川修庵 Kagawa Shūan (referenced as 衡山先生, “Kōzan-sensei”, under whom Kondō reports having briefly studied in Kyōto), and 吉益東洞 Yoshimasu Tōdō (1702–1773), to whom he attributes the famous one-pathogen-one-poison (一氣一毒) reductionism, and against whom much of the work’s polemic is directed; he also reports a year of study with the Asai 淺井 school of LíngSù / Nánjīng hermeneutics. The opposing canon to which he repeatedly returns is the JīnYuán synthesis represented by 李杲 Lǐ Dōngyuán and 薛己 Xuē Jǐ (with whom Kondō places himself as a follower of the supplementing-tonifying tradition). The internal datable references (Asai-school study, Kagawa Shūan circle, completion in 1802) bracket the work to the late Tenmei 天明 — Kyōwa 享和 era, and the postface signature dates it precisely. The work was transmitted via the Kōkan igaku sōsho 皇漢醫學叢書 (1936, Shanghai Shìjiè Shūjú) and digitised by jicheng.tw; it stands as an internal Japanese critique of kohōha one-sidedness written from within the Edo medical tradition itself, contemporaneous with 吉益南涯 Yoshimasu Nangai’s softening of his father’s positions.
The catalog meta records 近藤明 without dynasty annotation; Kondō Akira / Takamasa is a Japanese physician of the Tokugawa period and not securely datable to a Chinese reign-period — the dynasty field is left as 清 here only for catalogue-meta consistency, with the actual composition date (Kyōwa 2 = 1802) precisely supplied.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. For the broader context of the Edo kohōha controversy in which this work intervenes, see Yakazu Dōmei 矢數道明, Kinsei Kanpō igaku-shi 近世漢方醫學史 (Tōkyō: Meiji Shoin, 1971); for the gosei-ha / kohō-ha debate in English see Susan L. Burns, “The Body as Text: Confucianism, Reproduction, and Gender in Early Modern Japan”, in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin A. Elman et al. (UCLA Asian Pacific Monographs, 2002).