Yīyuán 醫原
The Origins of Medicine by 石壽棠 Shí Shòutáng (hào Fúnán 芾南; the catalog meta gives the studio-name 石壽堂 as the author tag, which in context refers to the same Shí Fúnán of Húátíng 華亭 / Sōngjiāng), Qīng xiàngshēng / jǔrén and scholar-physician of the mid-nineteenth century.
Catalog tag note: the catalog meta records the author as 石壽堂 (literally “Shí Cháng-life-Hall”), which is the studio-name rather than the personal name. The same physician is referred to in the prefaces and within the work as 石芾南 / 石孝廉 (the xiàngshēng honorific). The KR-canonical person-note filename adopted here is 石壽棠 (the personal name attested in the work’s authorship line and in modern reference works), with 石芾南 / 石壽堂 as alternate names.
About the work
A two-juǎn compilation of twenty doctrinal essays (èrshí piān 二十篇) probing the conceptual foundations of medical practice — the Yījīng 易經 cosmological framework (Xī Wén Zhī yàozhǐ 羲文之要旨), the Língshū / Sùwèn technical apparatus, and the integration of cosmological and clinical reasoning for everyday practitioner use. The work is written in the bābǎi shànjiě 白香山解 mode — accessible to literate non-specialists (“even an old woman can understand it”, lǎoyù kě jiě 老嫗可解) — and self-consciously addresses both the professional physician and the educated layman. Shí Fúnán’s central commitment is the Yìjīng-derived cosmological foundation of Chinese medicine: the work argues that the proper philosophical underpinning for medical reasoning is not the JīnYuán Four Masters’ partisan doctrines but the Yìjīng’s yīnyáng / wǔxíng framework as it grounds the Língshū and Sùwèn readings. The twenty essays are organised across the cosmological-clinical spectrum: foundations of jīngyì 經義 (canonical doctrine), pulse-and-tongue diagnosis, prescription logic, and disease-specific reasoning. The work is doctrinally important as the bridge between late-Qīng yījīng tōngrán 醫易通然 (“medicine and the Yìjīng share one ground”) scholarship and the more practical yīhuà / yīlùn genre.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text opens with two postfaces (bá 跋), in this order: 張聲馳 Zhāng Shēngchí of Huátíng 華亭 (1891, signed Guāngxù shíqīnián jìxià hòuxué Huátíng Zhāng Shēngchí 光緒十七年季夏後學華亭張聲馳) — recording his receipt of the manuscript from 呂伯仁 Lǚ Bórén (who had inherited it from his teacher 沈菊人 Shěn Júrén, who preserved Shí’s original) and his decision to print it with editorial revisions; and 周秉奎 Zhōu Bǐngkuí (style-name Yízhēn 頤貞, 1861, signed Xiánfēng shíyīnián suìcì xīnyǒu mèngxiàyuè 咸豐十一年歲次辛酉孟夏月) — recording the work’s encounter with 朱雨笙 Zhū Yǔshēng (máocái graduate) at the close of his thirty-year clinical career, his evaluation of Shí’s twenty-piece Yīyuán as a clearly-written precipitation of LíngSù doctrine “such that even a non-physician can understand it on first reading”, and his decision to support the work’s first printing in 1861.
Abstract
Shí Shòutáng 石壽棠 (hào Fúnán 芾南), late-Qīng xiàngshēng / jǔrén of Huátíng 華亭 (Sōngjiāng, modern Shàng-hǎi-region), is a less-documented late-Qīng physician-scholar than the 徐大椿 / 莫枚士 kǎozhèng line, but the Yīyuán situates him in an adjacent yījīng tōngrán tradition that emphasised the Yìjīng cosmological foundation over textual philology. The composition window 1855–1891 reflects (a) the latest defensible early date — the xiàngshēng recognition required for the Shí Fúnán title and the Shěn Júnán teacher-student transmission — and (b) the Zhāng Shēngchí postface terminus. The 1861 Zhōu Bǐngkuí postface is the earliest dated print witness; the work was almost certainly composed in the 1850s and circulated in manuscript among Shí’s intellectual circle for a decade before its first cut.
The work’s distinctive contribution is methodological: in an era dominated by the doctrinal-partisan disputes of the Wēnbìng 溫病 vs. kohōha-style classical-formulary lines, Shí Fúnán offers a self-consciously cosmological-foundational alternative — arguing that the proper basis of medical learning is the Yìjīng’s combinatorial logic of the trigrams and the five-phase / six-qì configurations as they generate the body’s organ-channel structure, rather than the Shānghán / Wēnbìng clinical decision-tree. This positioning makes the Yīyuán an important counterweight to the dominant late-Qīng technical-clinical literature and an early signal of the philosophical-medical synthesis that the Republican-era Mènghé school would later develop.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Yīyuán located. For the late-Qīng yījīng tōngrán tradition more broadly see Lin Fu-shih 林富士, Tàijí yǔ Zhōngyī 太極與中醫 (Taipei, 2003), and Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland Press, 2007).