Zhǐyuán yīhuà 止園醫話
Medical Talks of the Zhiyuan Studio by 羅文傑 Luó Wénjié (hào Zhǐyuán 止園; late-Qīng / early-Republican Sino-Western huìtōng 會通 physician), modern collation by 張紹舜 Zhāng Shàoshùn and 郭柳霞 Guō Liǔxiá.
About the work
A three-juǎn Republican-period yīhuà (medical talks) by Luó Wénjié 羅文傑, hào Zhǐyuán 止園. The Kanripo source is split into three files (_001 through _003) corresponding to the three juǎn. The work is explicitly designed as a Sino-Western huìtōng (integration) text rather than as a polemical defence of either tradition: each topic is treated by parallel presentation of Xīyī shēnglǐxué 西醫生理學 (Western-medical physiology) and Zhōngyī doctrinal sources from the Nèijīng and Nánjīng, with the explicit programmatic statement that “Zhōngyī que-fá jiěpōuxué” — Chinese medicine lacks anatomy, but its accumulated millennia of theoretical reflection have produced a miàobùkěsīyì (wondrously subtle) account of the principles of life that should be drawn on selectively. Juǎn 1 opens with the Shēnglǐxué hécān 生理學合參 (parallel-presentation physiology — brain, blood, nerve), the rest covers internal medicine topics, with case-records in juǎn 3 illustrating clinical huìtōng practice.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source compresses Luó’s frontmatter and main text. The text opens directly with the programmatic Shēnglǐxué hécān preface-essay, which functions as the de-facto introduction to the work: Luó frames the yīhuà as a beginners’ textbook (“為初學醫的立論，所以非常淺顯”) — its target audience is the new generation of Republican Chinese-medical students who will have to know both medical traditions. The closing passages of juǎn 3 (in the wàishàn 外疝 section) extend the huìtōng programme into the clinical: Luó instructs the Zhōngyī practitioner who encounters a patient with venereal-origin disease (méidúxìng 梅毒性) to refer the patient first for Western-medicine injection therapy, and then to treat the residual presentation — Zhōngyī should not “expend the patient’s time” treating with herbs alone.
Abstract
Luó Wénjié 羅文傑 (hào Zhǐyuán 止園) was a late-Qīng / early-Republican physician of the Sino-Western huìtōng persuasion. The catalog meta gives his dynasty as “末初” (i.e., 清末民初, the truncated Qīng-Republican transition label), consistent with the internal evidence of the text — Luó cites Western anatomy, Western pharmacological injection, and the existence of zhuānmén yīyuàn (specialty hospitals), but writes in the Republican yīhuà genre. Composition window 1929–1945 reflects this; the work was probably composed in the 1930s.
The work is a useful primary source for the Republican huìtōng (Sino-Western medical integration) school, an intellectual position distinct both from the conservative guóyī (national-medicine) defenders and from the radical Western-medical reformers. Its principal contemporaries in this tradition are the works of Zhāng Xīchún 張錫純 (Yīxué zhōngzhōng cānxī lù 醫學衷中參西錄, 1909–1924) and Yùn Tiěqiáo 惲鐵樵; Luó’s Zhǐyuán yīhuà is on the more pedagogical side of this corpus, addressed to Chinese-medical students who are being trained in both traditions.
Modern PRC editions in the hxwd series (here under Zhāng Shàoshùn 張紹舜 and Guō Liǔxiá 郭柳霞 as diǎnjiào collators) are based on Republican-era printings. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Zhǐ-yuán yī-huà located. For the Republican huì-tōng (Sino-Western integration) school, see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014); Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse (Chicago, 2014); Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis (Duke, 2002).