Yī yú 醫餘
Medical Surplus by 尾臺榕堂 Odai Yōdō (zì Shichō 士超, hào Yōdō 榕堂, 1799–1870) — Edo-period Japanese physician of the kohōha 古方派 lineage.
Catalog dynasty correction: the catalog meta records the author as 清; the author is a Japanese Edo-period (江戶) physician (Bunkyū 2 = 1862 preface), and the work is here recatalogued under 江戶 with the original meta-form retained as a Chinese-reception artifact. The catalog meta-name 尾台逸士超 preserves the 字 form 士超 with a Japanese honorific element; the standard form is 尾臺榕堂.
About the work
A three-juǎn / four-piān compilation by Odai Yōdō, the Edo-period kohōha 古方派 physician, gathering passages on medicine from the Zhōu–Hàn classics, the Zhūzǐ 諸子 (philosophical Masters), and the standard histories, each with Odai’s appended evaluative remarks (píngyǔ 評語) and brief explanatory notes (jiānzhù 箋註). The work is explicitly framed as a sequel to KR3eq037 Yoshimasu Tōdō’s Gǔshū yīyán 古書醫言: where Yoshimasu drew on Zhōu–Hàn medical lore to legitimize the kohōha return-to-antiquity programme, Odai extends the survey across the broader classical and philosophical corpus, retaining the kohōha doctrinal orientation but with a more philological, kǎojù-inflected method.
Prefaces
Two front-matter prefaces, both dated Bunkyū 2 = 1862:
- 多村直寬 Tamura Naohiro (hào Kōsō-setsusha 拷窗拙者), autumn 1862, situating Odai’s project as the continuation of Yoshimasu Tōdō’s fùgǔ 復古 (“return-to-antiquity”) programme and praising Odai’s study under the Mine (岑氏) lineage of the Yoshimasu school and his role as a contemporary peer of KR3eq037’s 淺田宗伯 Asada Sōhaku (zì Shíshí 識此) and Kuroda (黑田) Shiyū 子友.
- 鹽谷世弘 Shionoya Tōin (Shionoya Sei-kō), autumn 1862, recording Odai’s origins (北越 / Hokuetsu = Echigo; original surname 小杉 Kosugi; came to Edo as a youth; studied under 尾臺淺岳 Odai Sengaku and succeeded to the Odai family by his teacher’s command; also studied under 龜田鵬齋 Kameda Hōsai / Bōsai). Shionoya emphasizes that the work is divided into four piān with editorial commentary embedded throughout.
Abstract
Odai Yōdō 尾臺榕堂 (1799–1870), Echigo-born, Kosugi-by-birth, was one of the principal mid-nineteenth-century Edo kohōha physicians and the founder of the Odai house’s Edo practice. His scholarly formation combined the Yoshimasu Tōdō kohōha lineage (via Mine 岑氏 / 岑少翁) with the Kameda Hōsai Confucian-philological tradition — giving him an unusually rigorous textual-critical command for a clinician of the period. The Yī yú is the most explicitly text-historical of his works (in contrast to his more clinically-oriented Lèijùfāng guǎngyì 類聚方廣義 of 1856 and Fāngjī zhǐnán 方伎指南). The composition window 1840–1862 reflects his mature scholarly period and the Bunkyū 2 publication date. The work entered Chinese circulation through the late-Qīng / Republican-era Kōkan igaku sōsho 皇漢醫學叢書 (1936) repatriation programme and the Hangzhou Sānsān yīshè 三三醫社 edition; it is preserved digitally at jicheng.tw.
Historiographical significance: the Yī yú documents the late-Edo kohōha engagement with the broader Chinese classical corpus as a source of medical doctrine — a programmatic continuation of Yoshimasu Tōdō but with a substantially more kǎojù-philological method that parallels contemporaneous Chinese kǎojù yīxué (cf. KR3eq037 for Yoshimasu and KR3eq039 for the 徐大椿 Chinese kǎojù line). Not in CBDB (Japanese figure).
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Yī yú located. For the broader Edo kohōha context see Daniel Trambaiolo, “Translating the Body: Medical Education in Japan from the Edo Period to the Meiji Era” (Ph.D. thesis, Princeton, 2014); Yakazu Dōmei 矢數道明, Kinsei Kanpō igaku-shi 近世漢方醫學史 (Tōkyō: Meiji Shoin, 1971). The principal modern reference is Susan Burns, Kingdom of the Sick: A History of Leprosy and Japan (Hawaii, 2019), which discusses the Odai school’s place in late-Edo Japanese medicine.
Links
- Person note 尾臺榕堂.
- Predecessor work: KR3eq037 Gǔshū yīyán by 吉益為則 Yoshimasu Tōdō.
- Kanseki DB
- 醫餘 (jicheng.tw)