Shēngshēngtáng zhìyàn 生生堂治驗
Therapeutic Cases of the Shengsheng Hall by 中神琴溪 Nakagami Kinkei (1744–1833), with cases collected and edited by 小野遜 Ono Son.
Catalog dynasty correction: catalog meta records 清; both author and editor are Japanese Edo-period figures. We catalogue under 江戶.
About the work
A two-juǎn clinical case-record collection by Nakagami Kinkei — late-Edo Kyoto physician of the Yoshimasu Tōdō kohōha lineage — compiled by his pupil Ono Son from Nakagami’s three-generation family practice at the Shēngshēngtáng 生生堂. The preface (by an unnamed friend of the pupil’s, identified as 匡輔 Kuangfu) records that Ono Son, after three generations of family medical training, “carried his book-box a thousand li” to Kyoto to study with Nakagami, then took down the master’s case-records over years of evening transcription. The preface explicitly highlights Nakagami’s willingness to invert standard Yoshimasu-school therapeutic logic — using emetic instead of purgative (吐以下劑), warming instead of cooling drugs (溫以冷藥), employing cān / fù (人參 / 附子) on sunken pulses and shígāo / huánglián on floating pulses — and identifies this radical methodological flexibility as the work’s principal teaching.
Prefaces
The text opens with the friend’s preface to Ono Son’s compilation, signed by an unidentified contemporary, recording Ono’s biographical trajectory (three generations of family medicine → Kyoto pilgrimage → study with Nakagami → multi-year case-collection project).
Abstract
Nakagami Kinkei 中神琴溪 (1744–1833) was a long-lived Kyoto physician of the Yoshimasu Tōdō kohōha school, and one of the principal teachers of the second-generation Edo kohōha. His Shēngshēngtáng clinic in Kyoto trained pupils from across Japan. The Zhìyàn records the actual clinical material — case-records, pulse-and-formula correspondences, exceptional treatment-decisions — that underlay the abstract doctrinal positions of Yoshimasu Tōdō’s kohōha programme. The composition window 1790–1830 reflects Nakagami’s mature clinical period and Ono Son’s apprenticeship-collection process. The work entered Chinese circulation via the late-Qīng / Republican-era Kōkan igaku sōsho 皇漢醫學叢書 (1936) repatriation programme; it is preserved digitally at jicheng.tw.
Historiographical significance: the Shēngshēngtáng zhìyàn is one of the most useful single texts for studying the practical clinical application of the kohōha programme beyond the doctrinal statements of KR3eq037 (Yoshimasu’s Gǔshū yīyán) and KR3eq054 (Tsuruoki’s Idan). It documents the second-generation kohōha physicians’ willingness to depart from the radical-Yoshimasu purgative-emphasizing default, in particular by employing emetic techniques and warming therapies inverted from the standard kohōha schema. Not in CBDB (Japanese figures).
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of the Shēng-shēng-táng zhì-yàn located. For Nakagami Kinkei and the second-generation Kyoto kohōha school see Yakazu Dōmei 矢數道明, Kinsei Kanpō igaku-shi 近世漢方醫學史 (Tōkyō: Meiji Shoin, 1971); Daniel Trambaiolo, “Translating the Body” (Princeton diss., 2014).
Links
- Person notes 中神琴溪, 小野遜.
- Related Edo kohōha clinical case-records: KR3eq056 Jiànshū lù (吉益為則 Yoshimasu Tōdō cases recorded by 岩恭敬 Iwami Kyōkei).
- Kanseki DB
- 生生堂治驗 (jicheng.tw)