Yīyī bìng shū 醫醫病書
Book to Treat the Physicians’ Disease by 吳瑭 Wú Táng (zì Jūtōng 鞠通, 1758–1836), the founding figure of the mature Wēnbìng 溫病 (warm-disease) school and author of the great KR3ed092 Wēnbìng tiáobiàn 溫病條辨 (1813).
About the work
A two-juǎn polemical and clinical-theoretical treatise — Wú Jūtōng’s late-life programmatic critique of contemporary medical practice, structured around the title’s pun: yīyī 醫醫 (“treating the physicians”) bìng 病 (“disease”). The work argues that the principal disease of contemporary medicine is the practitioners’ own conceptual confusion, and offers a system of doctrinal bànghē 棒喝 (staff-and-shout) corrections aimed at standard mid-Qīng clinical errors. The work is contemporaneous with 章楠’s KR3eq036 Yīmén bànghē 醫門棒喝 in its general genre, but is distinguished by its sustained engagement with Wú Jūtōng’s own mature Wēnbìng-school doctrine and by its more philosophically rigorous structure. Wú’s principal targets are (a) the over-prescription of warming-tonifying drugs in Wēnbìng (warm-disease) contexts, where they exacerbate the underlying yīn-deficiency; (b) the misuse of Shānghán (cold-damage) classifications for Wēnbìng cases; (c) the standard mid-Qīng failure to discriminate between biǎo 表 (surface) and lǐ 裡 (interior) syndromes; (d) the systematic over-prescription of ginseng and other expensive drugs to commercial advantage. The work also includes substantive theoretical discussion of the sānjiāo 三焦 (triple burner) doctrine, integrating Wú’s Wēnbìng tiáobiàn three-jiao classification with the broader Chinese medical canon.
Prefaces
The jicheng.tw text carries the standard front-matter prefaces of the work; the work’s framing is consistent with Wú’s other late-life polemical writings.
Abstract
Wú Jūtōng 吳瑭 (1758–1836), the great Yángzhōu 揚州 (Jiāngsū) physician who codified the mature Wēnbìng school in his foundational Wēnbìng tiáobiàn (1813), composed the Yīyī bìng shū in the late phase of his career as a complement to the systematic doctrinal exposition of the Tiáobiàn. The composition window 1798–1830 reflects the post-Tiáobiàn phase of his career (the Tiáobiàn circulated in manuscript from 1798 and was printed in 1813); the precise date of the Yīyī bìng shū is not recoverable. The work entered modern Chinese circulation through the jicheng.tw digitisation.
Historiographical significance: the Yīyī bìng shū is one of the principal mid-to-late Qīng polemical-clinical handbooks for the Wēnbìng-school programme of correcting contemporary medical practice. Its sustained engagement with the sānjiāo doctrine establishes Wú Jūtōng as the most theoretically rigorous of the mature Wēnbìng school authorities, and its polemical tone — anticipating 孟今氏’s KR3eq019 Yī yī yī of 1909 by approximately a century — established a sub-genre of late-imperial medical-reform writing. CBDB does not record Wú Jūtōng. See person note 吳瑭.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Yīyī bìng shū located. Wú Jūtōng’s broader Wēnbìng corpus is treated extensively in Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2011), and his foundational Wēnbìng tiáobiàn in many modern Chinese medical anthologies.
Links
- Wú Jūtōng (zh)
- Person note 吳瑭.
- Cross-reference: KR3ed092 Wēnbìng tiáobiàn.
- Kanseki DB
- 醫醫病書 (jicheng.tw)