Shàngchí záshuō 上池雜說
Miscellaneous Discussions from the Upper Pond by 馮時可 Féng Shíkě (hào Yuánchéng 元成 / 元成子, the catalog-meta entry 馮元成 refers to this same Sōngjiāng physician-official, conventionally dated Wànlì era, 1549–c. 1623).
Catalog name-form note: the catalog meta records the author as 馮元成 — using the hào form 元成. The personal name attested in the work itself and in late-Míng / Qīng reference works is 馮時可 字 元成 / 敏卿. We catalogue here under the personal name in the person-note while preserving the hào form in the frontmatter persons: list for consistency with the catalog meta.
About the work
A one-juǎn collection of late-Míng záshuō “miscellaneous discussions” on medical topics, organised as a sequence of free-standing aphoristic essays interleaved with clinical case-records. The title’s “Upper Pond” (Shàngchí 上池) alludes to the legendary “chíshuǐ” (pond-water) which the Shǐjì’s 扁鵲 Biǎnquè received from the immortal Chángsāngjūn 長桑君 — the conventional metonym for ultimate clinical insight. The work’s principal doctrinal positions: (a) a strong anti-Zhū Dānxī polemic (“人以陽氣為主，陰常有餘，陽常不足” — “the human body is governed by yángqì; yīn is always in surplus, yáng is always insufficient”), explicitly inverting 朱震亨’s foundational doctrine of “陽常有餘，陰常不足” and calling for warming-tonifying rather than yīn-supplementing prescriptions; (b) a sustained critique of late-Míng polypharmacy (“今人遇病立方，動輒二十餘品” — “contemporary physicians at first encounter prescribe twenty-some ingredients”) in favour of the small, focused, 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng-style formula; (c) a careful re-evaluation of fùzǐ 附子 (aconite) as a major underused tonifying drug, with extended case-record evidence (徐南湖 Xú Nánhú’s clinical successes; the 王典 Wáng Diǎn case; the Wǔlín 童南恆 Tóng Nánhéng case of fùzǐ misuse leading to brain abscess and death — preserved as a cautionary tale); (d) a critical defense of bādòu 巴豆 and dàhuáng 大黃 against the dominant late-Míng caution; (e) reflections on emotion-and-disease (the 邵雍 Shào Yáofū dictum “百病起於情” “every disease originates in emotion”). The work also preserves a substantial appended proven-recipe section (jīngmù lǚyàn liángfāng 經目屢驗良方) — Tàijí guāngtǒng 太極光統, Gànxuě dān 紺雪丹, Qīnglián sǎn 青蓮散, and roughly twenty other late-Míng formulas — that gives the work additional value as a clinical reference.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text opens directly with the doctrinal essays without a separate front-matter preface in the present digital exemplar. The work’s late-Míng circulation history is incompletely recoverable from the present source; the standard Wànlì-era cuts (the Xuānlùtāng 玄露堂 family-press editions) preserve a brief self-preface that is not in the jicheng.tw exemplar.
Abstract
Féng Shíkě 馮時可 (zì Mǐnqīng 敏卿, hào Yuánchéng 元成 / Yuánchéngzǐ, 1549–c. 1623), Sōngjiāng 松江 jìnshì (1571) and prominent late-Míng official-physician, served in various provincial posts (including a long stint as governor of Yúnnán in the Wànlì 30s, 1602–1620s) before retiring to combine official career with medical scholarship. The catalog meta dates him to the Míng without finer specification; the standard Wànlì-era dating 1549–c. 1623 follows the standard Chinese-language reference works (Míngrén zhuànjì zīliào cídiǎn 明人傳記資料辭典 et al.). The composition window 1570–1620 reflects the latest defensible early date (the post-jìnshì clinical accumulation that internal evidence requires) and his approximate death-year. The work entered modern Chinese circulation through the late-Qīng Cóngshū jíchéng 叢書集成 anthology, the Xuéhǎi lèibiān 學海類編 collection, and subsequently the jicheng.tw digitisation.
The work’s principal doctrinal interest is its early systematic anti-Zhū Dānxī position — preceding the more famous 張介賓 Zhāng Jièbīn / Jǐngyuè warming-tonifying campaign of the late-Wànlì / early-Tiānqǐ era by approximately a generation. Féng’s inversion of the “陽常有餘陰常不足” doctrine is one of the earliest sustained late-Míng critiques of the JīnYuán inheritance and an important precursor to the wēnbǔ pài 溫補派 (warming-tonifying school) that Zhāng Jièbīn would canonise. The work also preserves an important early-modern case-record of aconite toxicity — the Wǔlín (Hángzhōu) Tóng Nánhéng case of brain-abscess death after self-administration of an aconite-and-warming-drug regimen — that became a standard cautionary reference in the late-Qīng yīhuà tradition.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Shàngchí záshuō located. For the late-Míng anti-Zhū Dānxī tradition that the work helped found see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011), and Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland Press, 2007), ch. 2.