Huíchūn lù 回春錄
Records of Restoring Spring clinical case-records of 王士雄 Wáng Shìxióng (zì Mèngyīng 孟英, 1808–1868), compiled by 周鑅 Zhōu Yīng (the author’s elder colleague at the Chángshān 長山 medical circuit), preface dated Dàoguāng 23 (= winter of 1843).
Catalog correction: the data/catalogs/meta entry transcribes the author’s name as 王士維, but the work’s own preface (signed Yú yǒu Wángjūn Mèngyīng 余友王君孟英) makes clear that the author is Wáng Shì-xióng 王士雄 (zì Mèngyīng), the same physician who compiled KR3eq003 Liǔzhōu yīhuà and the Wēnrè jīngwěi 溫熱經緯. The catalog meta reads 王士維 only because the 维 and 雄 graphs are easily confused in nineteenth-century cursive hands. We catalogue here under the corrected 王士雄, with this note in the prose.
About the work
A one-juǎn clinical case-record compilation (yīàn 醫案) preserving the most striking treatment cases from the first two decades of Wáng Shìxióng’s clinical career (c. 1823–1843, i.e. from his late teens, when his father’s deathbed charge — recorded in the preface — committed him to medicine, through his early-thirties practice at the Chángshān 長山 circuit). The cases are organised by disease category (the surviving first internal-medicine section Nèikē — Gǎnmào 內科感冒 opens the work) and present each clinical encounter in the canonical late-Qīng yīàn format: patient identification, presenting complaint, pulse-and-tongue, Wáng’s diagnostic reasoning, his prescribed formula with exact composition, and follow-up data — with substantial appended discussion of the reasoning. The opening case of an octogenarian He 何 with cold-damage-and-falsely-elevated-yang (shāngfēng yì yǒu dàiyáng zhèng yě 傷風亦有戴陽證) shows Wáng applying the Yú Jiāyán 喻昌 Shànglùn piān 尚論篇 dàiyáng analysis to a contemporary Hángzhōu case in characteristic syncretic mode (Yú Jiāyán’s analytical framework + 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Zhēnwǔ tāng 真武湯 / Sìnì tāng 四逆湯 prescriptions). The work is the principal source for Wáng’s earlier clinical method, prior to the great Wēnbìng synthesis of the Wēnrè jīngwěi (1852).
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text opens with a preface by 周鑅 Zhōu Yīng (signed Dàoguāng èrshísān nián guǐmǎo dōng shíèr yuè, Yú dì Zhōu Yīng bàití 道光二十三年癸卯冬十二月愚弟周鑅拜題, i.e. twelfth month of Dàoguāng 23 = January 1844). Zhōu records Wáng’s deathbed promise to his father to “be useful in the world”; his refusal of the liángxiàng official-administrator path for the liángyī good-physician path; his naming of his studio as the Qiánzhāi 潛齋; his self-discipline as a young physician at Chángshān (“seeing him at his daily clinical work was like watching divine inspiration; in his off hours he never let down a book”); and the explicit editorial precedent — 丁長孺 Dīng Chángrú’s edition of 繆希雍 Miù Xīyōng’s case-records — for Zhōu’s own anthologising of the master’s clinical cases.
Abstract
Wáng Shìxióng 王士雄 (Mèngyīng 孟英, 1808–1868), native of Hǎiníng 海寧 (Zhèjiāng) and resident in Hángzhōu, is the principal late-Qīng Wēn-bìng-school clinician — see person note 王士雄 for biographical detail. The Huíchūn lù is the earliest of Wáng’s case-record compilations, completed nine years before the publication of his definitive Wēnrè jīngwěi (1852) and seventeen years before his exile to Shànghǎi during the Tàipíng war. As such it captures Wáng’s clinical method in its pre-systematic form: the cases are organised by disease category in the late-Míng style of 江瓘 Jiāng Guàn’s Míngyī lèiàn rather than the post-1852 Wēnbìng-school doctrinal format, and Wáng’s diagnostic reasoning regularly cites 葉桂 Yè Tiānshì 葉天士 (whose Wēnrè lùn Wáng would later canonise), 喻昌 Yú Jiāyán, 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng, and 朱震亨 Zhū Dānxī as equal authorities — without the doctrinal preference for the YèWúXuē Wēnbìng line that became his post-1852 signature. The composition window 1830–1843 reflects the clinical decade Zhōu Yīng excerpts and the editorial preparation date respectively; the volume entered modern Chinese circulation through the jicheng.tw digitisation.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Huíchūn lù located. Wáng Shìxióng’s broader Wēnbìng corpus is treated in Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011). The case-record genre to which the Huíchūn lù belongs is treated in Joanna Grant, A Chinese Physician: Wang Ji and the Stone Mountain Medical Case Histories (Routledge, 2003).