Lěnglú yīhuà 冷廬醫話
Cold-Hut Medical Discourses by 陸以湉 Lù Yǐtián (zì Dìngpǔ 定圃, 1801/1802–1865), Qīng scholar-physician of Tóngxiāng 桐鄉; the standard imprint also incorporates a Bǔbiān 補編 (Supplementary Compilation) by 何廉臣 Hé Liánchén (1861–1929) of Shàoxīng, prepared for the Zhōngguó yīxué dàchéng 中國醫學大成 series.
About the work
A five-juǎn compilation by Lù Yǐtián combining doctrinal essays, clinical maxims, and a substantial number of evaluative biographical sketches of late-Míng and Qīng physicians (葉桂 Yè Tiānshì 葉天士, 薛雪 Xuē Shēngbái 薛生白, 徐大椿 Xú Língtāi, 魏之琇 Wèi Yùhuáng, Chángzhōu and Sūzhōu medical specialists), with running editorial annotations by Hé Liánchén dated 1936 (Bǐngzǐ 丙子 third month). Each entry opens with the topical heading set in extracts from the classical or recent literature (Yīfàn 醫範 “Physicians as Model”, Yījiàn 醫鑑 “Mirror for Physicians”, Shènjí 慎疾 “Caution in Illness”, Bǎoshēng 保生 “Preserving Life”, Shènyào 慎藥 “Caution in Pharmacy”, Qiúyī 求醫 “Seeking Medical Help”, Zhěnfǎ 診法 “Diagnostic Method”, Mài 脈 “On the Pulse”, Yòngyào 用藥 “On the Application of Drugs”), and continues into extended editorial discussion. The work’s most-cited and methodologically important contribution is its biographical-historical interest in mid-Qīng medical celebrities, preserving anecdotes about Yè Tiānshì and Xuē Shēngbái (the Sǎoyèzhuāng 掃葉莊 vs. Tàxuězhāi 踏雪齋 rivalry), the late Qiánlóng physician Hé Shūtián 何書田 of Chángshú, and the late Dào-guāng-era Tāngshī 湯氏 / Zhāng Mènglú 張夢廬 of Tóngxiāng. The Hé Liánchén supplement adds clinical revisions (especially correcting Lù’s recipes against early-Republican knowledge of wēnbìng practice) and historical glosses.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text opens with a postface (bá 跋) by 龐元澄 Páng Yuánchéng (hào Wūchéng* 烏程), the Húzhōu 湖州 collector who first printed the work in 1897 (Guāngxù 23, 強圉作噩 qiángyǔ zuòè = dīngyǒu) at the close of his ten-year project to acquire Lù’s literary remains. Páng’s preface explains the work’s textual history: he had earlier purchased the printing blocks of Lù’s Lěnglú záshí 冷廬雜識 (Cold-Hut Miscellany, 1855), then sought out Lù’s medical works, acquiring in 1895 (yǐwèi 乙未) manuscript copies of the Zàixù míngyī lèiàn 再續名醫類案 and the Lěnglú yīhuà, the latter of which he prepared for press in a pocket-sized Gǔxiāngzhāi 古香齋 format because of its “particularly useful character for the times”. A second preface by 何廉臣 Hé Liánchén (signed Bǐngzǐ 1936) describes his own Bǔbiān programme and announces the work’s inclusion in the Zhōngguó yīxué dàchéng 中國醫學大成 (Great Compendium of Chinese Medicine) anthology series.
Abstract
Lù Yǐtián 陸以湉 (1801/1802–1865; zì Dìngpǔ 定圃), native of Tóngxiāng 桐鄉 (Zhèjiāng), is the principal mid-Qīng scholar-physician of the ChángzhōuHúzhōu cultural circuit. A jǔrén who served briefly as Magistrate in Tāizhōu 臺州 (the work records the death of his “younger brother” while he was guānshū at Tāizhōu under the Qiánlóng regime in error — the Tāizhōu posting is actually Dàoguāng), Lù was a polymath whose principal non-medical work is the Lěnglú záshí 冷廬雜識 of 1855. Composition of the Yīhuà is bracketed by the late záshí phase (mid-1850s, with internal Xiánfēng-period 咸豐 references including the 1858 death of his uncle-by-marriage Niǔ Gēngméi 鈕羹梅) and Páng Yuánchéng’s 1897 printing; the present edition entered modern Chinese circulation through the Zhōngguó yīxué dàchéng and the jicheng.tw digital corpus. Hé Liánchén’s Bǔbiān annotations are a separable, dated layer (1936).
The work is unusual within the yīhuà genre for the depth of its historical-biographical interest: it preserves, e.g., a detailed anecdote about 薛雪 Xuē Shēngbái and 葉桂 Yè Tiānshì jointly diagnosing a Sūzhōu lamplighter, the celebrated “Sǎoyèzhuāng 掃葉莊 / Tàxuězhāi 踏雪齋” exchange of insulting villa-names through which the two Sūzhōu physicians signalled their mutual contempt, the warning anecdotes about Sòng Sū Shì 蘇軾’s death of misadministered tonics in 1101 (incorporating Lín Chāngyí 林昌彝’s Shèyīng shīhuà 射鷹詩話 critique of the drugs Sū was given), and a substantial late-Qīng búzhīmíngyī 不知名醫 / huǐrén 毀人 typology that anticipates the early-Republican attempts to set ethical standards for clinical practice. Hé Liánchén’s annotations represent one of the earliest substantive engagements between high Republican clinical scholarship and the late-Qīng medical-biography tradition.
The catalog meta records Lù’s lifedates as Qīng; the conventional Chinese reference 1801–1865 is followed here. CBDB does not record him (limited late-Qīng coverage). Hé Liánchén’s lifedates 1861–1929 are taken from standard Chinese medical-biography references; he is a key figure in the Republican movement to reform Chinese medical education.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located dedicated specifically to the Lěnglú yīhuà. The text is briefly cited in Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland Press, 2007), as an authority on late-Qīng physician-prosopography. Hé Liánchén’s broader Republican-era reform programme is treated in Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (Chicago, 2014).
Other points of interest
Lù’s defence of Wú Tāng 吳瑭 Wēnbìng tiáobiàn in juǎn 1, while rejecting Wú’s ascription of gānhuòluàn 乾霍亂 to a specifically yīn-and-damp aetiology, is a useful late-Qīng signal of how the Wēnbìng school’s foundational texts were being read with theological care by mid-nineteenth-century Jiāngnán physicians.