Huángshì yīhuà 黃氏醫話
Mr. Huang’s Discussions of Medicine by 黃漢如 Huáng Hànrú (early-Republican Shànghǎi yīzhǐchán tuīná 一指禪推拿 master).
About the work
A one-juǎn Republican-era yīhuà (medical talks / casebook-with-discussion) by Huáng Hànrú 黃漢如, a Shànghǎi practitioner of yīzhǐchán 一指禪 (One-Finger Chán) tuīná (medical massage). The text opens with Huáng’s own biànyán 弁言 (foreword), which reproduces verbatim his preface to the earlier Yīzhǐchán tuīná shuōmíngshū 一指禪推拿說明書 and then explains the genesis of the yīhuà: in a hot summer Huáng shut his clinic for ten days, his diagnostic work was taken over by his son Yīzhào 一照 and his wife Hànyún 漢芸 (both physicians in their own right), and the family’s collected case-experiences became the present compilation. Cases are organised as long-form first-person narratives in which Huáng diagnoses, prescribes massage rather than drugs where possible, and frequently contrasts his treatment with what other Chinese and Western physicians did to the same patient.
Prefaces
The work’s single front-matter text is Huáng’s own biànyán 弁言. It locates Huáng autobiographically: from boyhood he was committed to medicine; he trained in nèigōng / wàigōng 內外功 and the Yīzhǐchán zhèngzōng 一指禪正宗 lineage; he served briefly as a minor official (“一官瓠系”); after Xīnhài 辛亥 (1911) he turned to medicine as his sole profession. The foreword frames his clinical philosophy: drugs are kěwèi (fearsome), and the safer path is to expand the use of tuīná as a self-sufficient therapy capable of addressing many serious conditions. His son Yīzhào is named as the immediate motivating force behind the compilation, on the rationale that publicising both medical successes and the errors — Chinese and Western — that come the family’s way will benefit a wider patient public.
Abstract
The author Huáng Hànrú 黃漢如 is a recognisable early-Republican Shànghǎi figure: a minor Qīng official turned full-time physician after 1911, specialising in the yīzhǐchán lineage of tuīná (a Cháng-jiāng-delta single-finger thumb-pressure massage tradition with strong nèigōng underpinnings). His Yīzhǐchán tuīná shuōmíngshū (One-Finger Chán Massage Manual) went through ten editions by the late 1920s, and the present yīhuà belongs to the same Republican publishing programme. The catalog meta gives no dates; the foreword’s reference to 辛亥 + the ten-edition history of the manual yields a defensible circa 1925–1937 composition window for the yīhuà itself. Like other hxwd entries this one is a repatriated title — the work survived primarily in overseas-Chinese libraries and was returned to circulation in the PRC Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫古籍叢書.
Historiographically the Huángshì yīhuà is a valuable primary source for two related topics: (i) early-Republican Sino-Western diagnostic encounter in private clinical practice — Huáng’s case narratives consistently stage himself, an internal-medicine Chinese doctor, and a Western-medical practitioner around a single patient, and his polemical voice is sharper than most Republican yīhuà in identifying what he sees as the failure-modes of each; and (ii) the professionalisation of tuīná, which by the early Republic was being repositioned as a stand-alone medical specialty (with its own clinical literature, textbooks, and Shànghǎi association politics) rather than as an ancillary technique. The case-records include the patient name and family circumstances in the manner of late-Qīng yīàn literature, and document the post-1911 Shànghǎi gentry-bourgeois medical-consumption pattern. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Huáng-shì yī-huà located. For the Republican-period repositioning of tuī-ná and the yī-zhǐ-chán lineage see Vivienne Lo and Penelope Barrett, eds., Imagining Chinese Medicine (Brill, 2018); and Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014). For the broader Republican Sino-Western clinical encounter, see Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse (Chicago, 2014).
Links
- Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū (hxwd) repatriation series entry.
- Person note 黃漢如.