Zhégōng mànlù 折肱漫錄
Casual Records of the Broken Arm [Becoming-a-Physician] by 黃承昊 Huáng Chénghào (zì Lǚsù 履素, 1572–1641), late-Míng Jiāxīng 嘉興 scholar-official and lay-medical author.
About the work
A six-juǎn lay-physician memoir-treatise by Huáng Chénghào — the late-Míng Jiāxīng (Zuìlǐ 檇李) scholar-official who took up medical self-study after his own protracted youthful illness, hence the zhégōng 折肱 (“broken-arm”) title (the Zuǒzhuàn commonplace: sānzhé gōng wéi liángyī 三折肱為良醫 — “to break one’s arm three times is to become a good physician”). The work is organized by topic across the six juǎn: (1) general medical philosophy and self-treatment history; (2) drug-and-formulary observations; (3) dietary-hygienic reflection; (4) specific disease observations (smallpox, dysentery, malaria, etc.); (5) materia medica notes; (6) prescriptions and case-records. Throughout, Huáng’s distinctive voice is the lay-physician’s experiential evidentialism — he reports what worked for his own body and what did not, with explicit dates and circumstances, and refuses doctrinaire commitment to any one school’s theoretical framework.
Prefaces
Multiple prefaces in the standard recension (the hxwd _000.txt exemplar contains the principal late-Míng paratext). Huáng’s own self-preface dates the work’s composition to the late-Tiānqǐ / early-Chóngzhēn period (c. 1625–1635), reflecting two decades of accumulated self-treatment experience.
Abstract
Huáng Chénghào 黃承昊 (Lǚsù, 1572–1641), late-Míng Jiāxīng scholar-official and àncháshǐ 按察使 of Fújiàn, is one of the most articulate lay-physician memoir-authors of the late-Míng period. His Zhégōng mànlù is among the most-cited late-Míng lay-physician self-treatment memoirs and remained a model for the broader genre into the late-Qīng and Republican periods (cf. KR3eq065 Cíjì yīhuà for an early-Republican continuation). The composition window 1620–1640 reflects Huáng’s mature scholarly-official period and the late-Chóngzhēn publication. The work entered Chinese circulation via the late-Qīng / Republican Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí (hxwd) repatriation programme.
Historiographical significance: the Zhégōng mànlù is one of the principal late-Míng lay-physician memoir-treatises — the genre of educated-amateur medical literature produced by Confucian officials who turned to medicine after personal-suffering motivation. The genre stands in tension with the late-Míng professional-physician literature (e.g. KR3eq034 Miào Xīyōng’s Xiānxǐngzhāi yīxué guǎngbǐjì) by virtue of its (a) explicit-personal evidential basis, (b) institutional-amateur status, and (c) Confucian-classical doctrinal-integrative orientation. Huáng is not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Zhé-gōng màn-lù located. For late-Míng lay-physician literature see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665 (California, 1999); Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China (California, 2010); Hinrichs and Barnes, eds., Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard, 2013).
Links
- Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū (hxwd) repatriation series entry.
- Person note 黃承昊 (= Huáng Chénghào).