Shìyǐnlú yīxué zázhù 市隱廬醫學雜著
Miscellaneous Medical Essays from the City-Hermit Studio by 王德森 Wáng Désēn (hào Suìjūshì 歲居士 / Suìhánjūshì 歲寒居士; native of Yùfēng 玉峰 / Kūnshān, mid-19th-century).
About the work
A one-juǎn mid-Qīng medical-essay collection by Wáng Désēn, written in his Sūzhōu studio called Shìyǐnlú 市隱廬 (“City-Hermit Hut” — the shìyǐn of late-Imperial scholarship, a retreat-in-the-city posture). The text is one of the lesser-known but unusually pointed Daoguang–Xianfeng-era yīzázhù (miscellaneous medical essays), notable for its sharp polemic against fashionable physicians of the Sūzhōu Wúmén region who, Wáng argues, prescribe routine píngdàn (bland-temperate) formulas — typically combinations of sāngyè, dānpí, zhīzǐ, dòuchǐ — without taking a serious clinical history. The opening essay Kǔkǒu póxīn yǔ 苦口婆心語 (“Bitter-Mouth Old-Granny Words”) sets the rhetorical key: the patient’s family takes such formulas to be “safe” (wěndàng), and the physician readily hides his incompetence under them, with the result that the disease deepens unnoticed and the patient becomes unsalvageable.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source preserves three pieces of frontmatter, all dated 癸丑 = Xiánfēng 3 = 1853: (i) the Zhào preface by Zhào Yǒngnián 趙永年 of Yángzǐ (Yángzhōu), dated Guǐchǒu early summer 癸丑初夏; (ii) the Xiè inscription-poem (tící) by Quánshí shānrén Xiè Féngyuán 拳石山人謝逢源 dated Guǐchǒu súfórì 癸丑俗佛日 (i.e. the colloquial Buddha’s birthday); and (iii) Wáng’s own biànyán 弁言, signed “Yùfēng Suìjūshì shū yú Wúmén Shìyǐnlú, shí zài Guǐchǒu Qīnghé yuè” 玉峰歲居士書於吳門市隱廬時在癸丑清和月 (“the Suì-Recluse of Yùfēng, written at the City-Hermit Hut in Wúmén, in the Qīnghé [4th] month of Guǐchǒu”). Wáng explains that his father, elder brothers, teachers, and friends were all physicians (父兄師友，莫不知醫), that he picked up medicine from boyhood observation, that in middle age he had to earn a living away from home and read his way through the Sùwèn and Língshū on his own, that he was finally drawn back into the medical role through twenty years of family treatment and reluctant requests from relatives — and that the present essays record the xīndé (mature reflections) he has accumulated in that time.
Abstract
Wáng Désēn 王德森, hào Suìjūshì 歲居士 / Suìhánjūshì 歲寒居士, was a mid-19th-century scholar-physician of Yùfēng 玉峰 (Kūnshān, in Sūzhōu prefecture) writing at the Wúmén Shìyǐnlú. The catalog meta gives him as 清; the date is fixed by the threefold Guǐchǒu dating of the frontmatter at Xiánfēng 3 (1853), immediately before the Tàipíng rebellion’s destruction of the JiāngZhè region.
The work is a useful primary source for two related topics: (i) the mid-19th-century critique of routine prescribing in the Wúmén / Sūzhōu medical market — Wáng’s analysis is more sociologically incisive than 李冠仙’s parallel attack on wēnbǔ abuse in KR3eq084 Zhīyī bìbiàn (1848), because Wáng identifies the patient-side incentive: lay patients want píngdàn formulas because they sound safe, which gives mediocre physicians cover for not investigating; (ii) the late-Imperial shìyǐn (city-hermit) literatus-physician posture, in which a Kūnshān gentry-man stages himself as an amateur-by-necessity rather than a professional. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Shì-yǐn-lú yī-xué zá-zhù located. For the late-Imperial Wú-mén medical market and the gentry-physician interface, see Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women (UC Press, 2010) and Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007) — the latter has substantial discussion of the Mèng-hé / Jiāng-Sū regional medical economy in the period just before Wáng was writing.