Yǒuyúzhāi yīhuà 友漁齋醫話
Medical Discourses of the Friendly-Fishing Studio by 黃凱鈞 Huáng Kǎijūn (zì Hétíng 鶴亭, hào Yǒuyú 友漁; Qīng physician of Jiāshàn 嘉善, Zhèjiāng, active in the early nineteenth century).
About the work
A collected work in eight species (八種, bā zhǒng), each species occupying one juǎn, devoted to different sub-departments of clinical medicine and pharmacy. The opening of the jicheng.tw text confirms the structure (Dìliù zhǒng 第六種 “the sixth species” — i.e. the sequential numbering of the collected components). The principal species — best represented in the present jicheng.tw cut — is the Yàolóng xiǎopǐn 藥籠小品 (“Slight Pieces from the Drug-Cabinet”), Huáng’s classified materia-medica handbook of approximately three hundred frequently-used drugs, each treated under his characteristic two-part heading: a brief technical description (channel-entry, taste-temperature, principal indications) followed by his own clinical commentary. The classical pharmacopoeia metaphor at the work’s opening — Shénnóng’s three classes of three hundred and sixty-five drugs, expanded by 李時珍 Lǐ Shízhēn to 1871 — is the explicit framing. Huáng’s editorial method is to organise the yàolóng not by formal classification but by what he calls the practical drugs of a working clinician’s pharmacy: people-roster style (人才), each drug treated as a personality with characteristic strengths and weaknesses (人參 “Heads the army of grasses, treats a hundred diseases, the sage-drug of qì-deficiency”; 黃耆 “Repairs qì, second only to ginseng”; 白朮 “Wild varieties scarce; the Tāizhōu fènzhú 糞術 cultivated form is now the standard despite the demeaning name”; etc.). The other seven species are similarly organised handbook-style treatments of clinical-theoretical topics (pulse interpretation, shānghán practice, paediatrics, gynaecology, yīàn case-records, and lifestyle-advice).
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text carries only the brief section-header “Dìliù zhǒng 第六種” — i.e. the present digital exemplar opens at the sixth species and does not preserve a unified front-matter preface. Standard print editions of the Yǒuyúzhāi yīhuà (the Chángshú Tàiyī shūjú 1925 lithographic reprint; the 1958 People’s Health Press cut) carry a Jiā-qìng-era 嘉慶 self-preface dating the work to the author’s late middle age and giving Hétíng / Yǒuyú as his sobriquets, but that paratext is not in the present jicheng.tw exemplar.
Abstract
Huáng Kǎijūn 黃凱鈞 (zì Hétíng 鶴亭, hào Yǒuyú 友漁) of Jiāshàn 嘉善, Zhèjiāng, was a Qīng-era physician active in the Jiāqìng — early Dàoguāng period (early-nineteenth century). The catalog meta dates him conventionally to the Qīng without finer specification. Internal evidence in the Yàolóng xiǎopǐn — the author’s complaint that “in the early years of the dynasty báishēn 白參 was bought-and-sold against gold one-for-one; in my own youth a five-cent slip cost fifty baǐjīn 白金; recent years have seen prices ten times higher” — places him securely after the Qiánlóng-era ginseng-price inflation and during the early-nineteenth-century price peak; the citation of Tuìān shīchāo 退庵詩鈔 (the Wénfāng zájì / Tuìān compendium of 梁章鉅 Liáng Zhāngjù, dated to the 1820s) further suggests composition in or slightly after the late 1810s. The conventional Chinese-reference date circa 1812 (cf. Huáng’s preface, surviving in the Chángshú reprint but not the jicheng.tw exemplar) lies comfortably within this 1810–1820 bracket.
The work belongs to the late-Qiánlóng / early-Dàoguāng practical-pharmacy genre, alongside 汪昂 Wāng Áng’s earlier Běncǎo bèiyào 本草備要 (1683), 吳儀洛 Wú Yíluò’s Běncǎo cóngxīn 本草從新 (1757), and the contemporary 張璐 Zhāng Lù Běnjīng féngyuán 本經逢源 tradition; what distinguishes Huáng’s compilation is its self-conscious literary-essay form (drugs treated as biographical sketches in the zhìrén 識人 mode, with personal clinical reminiscences attached). The reception history is modest but durable: the work was reprinted at intervals through the late Qīng (the Yúshān Tàiyī lithographic edition of c. 1925 is the standard pre-PRC cut) and entered the modern Zhōngyī yīhuà 中醫醫話 anthologies of the 1980s as a representative early-Qīng pharmacological practitioner’s text.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. Treatment in modern Chinese-language reference works concentrates on the Yào-lóng xiǎo-pǐn and its place within the late-Qīng practical-pharmacy tradition; see Mǎ Bóyīng 馬伯英, Zhōng-guó yī-xué wén-huà shǐ 中國醫學文化史 (Shànghǎi rénmín, 1994), and Liào Yùqún 廖育群 et al., Zhōng-guó kē-xué jì-shù shǐ — Yī-xué juàn 中國科學技術史·醫學卷 (Beijing: Kēxué chūbǎnshè, 1998).
Links
- Huáng Kǎijūn — see person note 黃凱鈞.
- Kanseki DB
- 友漁齋醫話 (jicheng.tw)