Cíjì yīhuà 慈濟醫話
Compassionate-Aid Medical Conversations
About the work
A three-cè clinical-theoretical compendium produced by a (self-effacing) early-Republican-period literatus-physician of the JiāngSū / Zhèjiāng region, framed by an autobiographical opening: the author trained as a Confucian scholar and turned to medical study after a thirty-year experience of his mother’s chronic illness — a conversion narrative explicitly modelled on the Yī yǐ àimǔ shìyī 醫以愛母事醫 tradition. The opening preface narrates the author’s reading-trajectory: first the Huáng Kūnzǎi yīshū bāzhǒng 黃坤載醫書八種 (the eight medical works of Huáng Yuányù 黃元御, 1705–1758, the radical Qián-lóng-era fúyáng yìyīn “raise-Yáng-suppress-Yīn” doctrinalist) and rejecting Huáng’s unbalanced yáng-emphasis; then Kē Yùnbó 柯韻伯 (Kē Qín 柯琴, Shānghán láisū jí), Yù Jiāyán 喻嘉言 (the great MíngQīng transition Shānghán-school commentator), Chén Xiūyuán 陳修園 (the Qiánlóng — Jiāqìng integrative-physician KR3eq012 / KR3eq085 / similar Xú Língtāi line), Xú Língtāi 徐靈胎 (= 徐大椿), and Lù Jiǔzhī 陸九芝 (KR3eq059) — establishing the work’s doctrinal position as integrative-orthodox (Zhāng Zhòngjǐng + Yè Tiānshì + Wú Jūtōng) with explicit rejection of doctrinaire monism.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with the author’s self-preface beginning “Yú zì yòu shì xiān cí jí, chuí sānshí nián” 余自幼侍先慈疾垂三十年 — recording his thirty-year experience of his mother’s chronic illness as the motivating event for his turn to medicine. Internal date reference “Guǐhài qiū” 癸亥秋 = autumn 1923, when the author saw a newspaper announcement of a Nèijīng zhùjiě chūbǎn-related publication, establishes the work’s terminus ante quem non in late 1923.
Abstract
The Cíjì yīhuà is one of the more articulate early-Republican literatus-physician self-statements — combining classical-medical doctrinal commitment with the yīyǐ àimǔ “filial-piety motivation” Confucian conversion-narrative. The author is not identified by name in the available paratexts of the hxwd recension; the Cíjì title may reference a Cíjì 慈濟 charitable-medical institution (early-Republican period saw a proliferation of these in JiāngSū / Zhèjiāng), or may be a zhāimíng 齋名 of the author. The composition window 1923–1935 reflects the autumn-1923 internal date reference and the standard interwar-period circulation of such texts in the late-Republican Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí repatriation programme.
Historiographical significance: the Cíjì yīhuà is a useful example of the early-Republican literatus-physician’s doctrinal self-positioning — explicitly rejecting both the radical fúyáng Huáng Yuányù line and the wholesale-rejection-of-tradition Western-medical line, in favor of an integrative-orthodox synthesis drawing on the Shānghán-commentary tradition (Kē Qín, Yù Jiāyán) and the Wēnbìng-school (Yè Tiānshì, Wú Jūtōng, Lù Jiǔzhī).
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Cí-jì yī-huà located. For early-Republican literatus-physician self-positioning see Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse (Chicago, 2014); Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine 1850–1960 (UBC, 2014).