Lángzhōng yīhuà 郎中醫話
A Wandering-Doctor’s Medical Conversations
About the work
A one-juǎn folk-medical pitch-and-narrative text in the voice of an itinerant lángzhōng 郎中 (wandering doctor / mountain-medicine seller) — opening with the classic yāohè 吆喝 (“street-cry”) of the village pharmacy-peddler: “Yǒu bìng de kuài lái zhìbìng, lái le mài hǎolíngyào de le” 有病的快來治病，來了賣好靈藥的了 (“Those who are sick come quickly to be cured, the seller of fine spirit-medicines has arrived”). The work then proceeds in a colloquial-vernacular voice through: (a) the standard set-up of the patient encounter (pulse-taking — cùnguānchǐ 寸關尺 in adults, hǔkǒu sānguān 虎口三關 in children); (b) the catalog of conditions amenable to the lángzhōng’s treatment (liánchuāng 臁瘡 lower-leg ulcers, liúchuāng 瘤瘡 tumour-sores, women’s bleeding, children’s pǐmēn 痞悶); (c) the catalog of charlatan-pretensions to be guarded against (the tiger-head-and-bear-paw plasters that supposedly contain genuine tiger oil; the qiānyìnggāo 千應膏 / wànyìnggāo 萬應膏 panaceas; the sānshíliù wèi 36-ingredient or yībǎilíngbā wèi 108-ingredient formulary boasts) — a remarkable late-Qīng vernacular self-reflection on the practice of itinerant medical-marketplace fraud.
Prefaces
No separate front-matter preface in the hxwd _000.txt exemplar. The work opens directly with the lángzhōng street-cry.
Abstract
The Lángzhōng yīhuà is one of the very few surviving vernacular-Chinese itinerant-doctor pitch-and-self-reflection texts of the late-Imperial period. The catalog meta records no author. Internal evidence — the colloquial Mandarin register, the absence of any explicit Republican-era institutional reference, and the standard late-Qīng vernacular vocabulary (e.g. jūnchénzuǒshǐ 君臣佐使 of materia medica organization, the cùnguānchǐ / hǔkǒu sānguān pulse / paediatric-finger-diagnostic vocabulary, the tiger-and-bear plaster ingredients) — places the work in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. The composition window 1800–1900 reflects this estimate.
Historiographical significance: the Lángzhōng yīhuà is a uniquely valuable primary source for studying late-Imperial Chinese itinerant medical-marketplace practice — the vernacular pitch-and-self-reflection genre that has otherwise survived almost exclusively in folk-vaudeville (xiāngshēng 相聲 / kuàishū 快書 / shuōshū 說書) form rather than in textual transmission. The work’s explicit catalog of charlatan-medicine pretensions is one of the very few insider-critical vernacular accounts of itinerant-medical fraud, occupying a niche otherwise filled only by the standard physician-elite’s yōngyī 庸醫 critique literature (cf. KR3eq070 Huá Zhèn’s Liúxiāngguǎn yīhuà’s míngyī / yōngyī dichotomy).
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Láng-zhōng yī-huà located. For late-Imperial Chinese itinerant-medical practice see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine 1850–1960 (UBC, 2014); Hinrichs and Barnes, eds., Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard, 2013).
Other points of interest
The work is one of the principal primary-vernacular-Chinese sources on late-Imperial itinerant-medical pitch-rhetoric — a genre otherwise represented mainly in oral-performance traditions rather than in printed transmission.
Links
- Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū (hxwd) repatriation series entry.
- Author anonymous.