Gǔshū yīyán 古書醫言
Medical Words from the Ancient Books by 吉益為則 Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益為則 (also 吉益爲則 / Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞, 1702–1773), the founder of the Japanese kohōha 古方派 (“return-to-antiquity” / classical-formula) school of Edo-period medicine.
Catalog dynasty correction: the catalog meta records the author’s dynasty as 清 (“Qīng”), reflecting the contemporaneous dynasty in China; the author is in fact a Japanese Edo-period (江戶) physician, not a Qīng subject. We catalogue here under the Edo-period attribution while preserving the catalog form as an alternative tag.
About the work
A four-juǎn compilation of medical aphorisms and doctrinal essays by Yoshimasu Tōdō — the principal Japanese kohōha polemicist of the eighteenth century, whose work radically restructured the foundations of Japanese Chinese-medical practice by rejecting the JīnYuán Four Masters’ synthesis and re-canonising 張仲景 Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s classical-formulary tradition. The Gǔshū yīyán gathers Tōdō’s commentaries on the Shānghán lùn 傷寒論 and Jīnguì yàolüè 金匱要略 alongside his sustained polemics against the Língshū / Sùwèn tradition (which he treated as later pseudepigraphic compilations rather than authoritative canonical texts) and against the warming-tonifying 李杲 / 朱震亨 / 薛己 LǐZhūXuē JīnYuánMíng line. Tōdō’s principal doctrinal contributions: (a) the one-pathogen-one-poison (yīqì yīdú 一氣一毒) reductionist aetiology — all disease ultimately arising from a single pathogenic poison; (b) the corresponding therapeutic principle of treating poison with poison (yǐdú gōngdú 以毒攻毒) using the Zhāng Zhòngjǐng formulary; (c) the radical philological deflation of the LíngSù corpus as a Hàn-era misguided cosmological imposition on the otherwise sound classical-formulary tradition.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text carries the standard Edo-period front-matter; the work was edited posthumously by Tōdō’s pupils and circulated in Japan in the late eighteenth century. The work was substantially read by late-Qīng Chinese physicians of the kǎozhèng yīxué circle (notably 徐大椿 Xú Dàchūn read Yoshimasu Tōdō with selective sympathy; 余聽鴻 Yú Tīnghóng and 張錫純 Zhāng Xīchún engaged with Tōdō’s positions in the late Qīng and early Republican period). It entered modern Chinese circulation through the Kōkan igaku sōsho 皇漢醫學叢書 (1936) digitised by jicheng.tw.
Abstract
Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞 (also 為則 Tamenori, 1702–1773), Japanese physician of Kyōto in the mid Edo period, is the most important single figure in the eighteenth-century Japanese kohōha movement. His clinical practice and writings — especially the Yakuchō 藥徵 (Drug-Testimonies, 1771), the Idan 醫斷 (Medical Disputations), and the present Gǔshū yīyán — radically restructured the foundations of Japanese Chinese-medical practice along radical classical-formulary lines. The catalog meta dates him as Qīng (a contemporaneous attribution); the actual life-and-work setting is Edo-period Japan (1702–1773 lifedates). The composition window 1764–1773 reflects the mature productive period of his career and his death-year. The work was substantially read in late-Qīng / Republican-era China through the Kōkan igaku sōsho 皇漢醫學叢書 (1936) and through earlier Edo-Chinese book exchanges.
Doctrinal significance: Yoshimasu Tōdō’s kohōha radicalism is the most important single Japanese contribution to East Asian medical history and is the principal Edo-period antecedent to the late-Qīng / Republican-era debates about the canonical foundations of Chinese medicine. The polemic against the LíngSù corpus, the one-pathogen-one-poison reductionism, and the radical Zhāng Zhòngjǐng re-canonisation are all positions that anticipated by approximately two centuries key themes of the post-1929 zhōngyī kèxuéhuà 中醫科學化 (scientifisation of Chinese medicine) reform movement. The opposition position to Tōdō — represented by Kondō Akira’s 近藤明 KR3eq001 Téngshì yītán (1802) — was a moderate-syncretist Edo-era response that survives alongside Tōdō’s radicalism in the Japanese medical tradition.
Translations and research
Yoshimasu Tōdō’s kohōha movement has been the subject of substantial Japanese-language scholarship and a smaller body of European-language work. See Susan L. Burns, “The Body as Text: Confucianism, Reproduction, and Gender in Early Modern Japan”, in Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, ed. Benjamin A. Elman et al. (UCLA, 2002); Daniel Trambaiolo, “Translating the Body: Medical Education in Japan from the Edo Period to the Meiji Era” (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton, 2014). The standard Japanese reference is Yakazu Dōmei 矢數道明, Kinsei Kanpō igaku-shi 近世漢方醫學史 (Tōkyō: Meiji Shoin, 1971).