Yījiā xīnfǎ 醫家心法
Heart-Methods of the Medical House anonymous (catalog meta records no author).
About the work
A short one-juǎn compilation of medical-theoretical xīnfǎ 心法 (“heart-methods” — the master-to-disciple oral-transmission essentials of clinical practice), anonymous in the catalog meta. The genre belongs to the late-Míng / Qīng yījiā xīnfǎ sub-tradition — concise compilations of the working clinical wisdom of a medical-family tradition, presented as the xīnyìn 心印 (heart-seal) or miànshòu 面授 (face-to-face transmission) of master-to-disciple practice. Comparable works in the same tradition include the Yīmén xīnfǎ 醫門心法, Yīxué xīnfǎ 醫學心法, and the more famous late-Míng 喻昌 Yú Jiāyán Yīmén fǎlǜ 醫門法律 (1658).
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text carries the standard header without an identifiable preface in the present digital exemplar.
Abstract
The author is anonymous and the work is undated. The composition window 1600–1800 reflects the late-Míng / Qīng xīnfǎ sub-tradition to which the work belongs. The work is preserved in the jicheng.tw digital corpus; further documentation is not available in the present sources. The work’s principal interest is as an example of the anonymous xīnfǎ family-tradition literature that survives in fragmentary form in the late-imperial medical corpus — a literature whose anonymity reflects the priority of family / lineage-transmission practice over individual authorial attribution in late-imperial Chinese clinical medicine.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located devoted specifically to this work. For the late-Míng / Qīng xīnfǎ tradition more broadly see Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (UC Berkeley, 2010), and Joanna Grant, A Chinese Physician: Wang Ji and the Stone Mountain Medical Case Histories (Routledge, 2003).