Chóngqìngtáng suíbǐ 重慶堂隨筆
Random Notes from the Chongqing Hall by 王學權 Wáng Xuéquán (great-grandfather of Wáng Mèngyīng), edited and printed in 1855 by his great-grandson 王士雄 Wáng Shìxióng (Mèngyīng).
About the work
A two-juǎn clinical-philological notebook by Wáng Xuéquán, Qiánlóng / Jiā-qìng-era Hǎiníng (浙江海寧) physician — the great-grandfather of the dominant late-Qīng Wēnbìng physician 王士雄 Wáng Mèngyīng. The text was preserved in the Wáng household manuscript collection and printed in 1855 (Xiánfēng 5) by Wáng Mèngyīng, who collated and prepared it for press as part of his publication of the Wáng family’s accumulated medical writings. It is one of the most intellectually interesting late-Imperial Chinese medical texts because of its sustained engagement with Western anatomical knowledge as transmitted through the Jesuit-Ming Rénshēn túshuō 人身圖說 and Rénshēn shuōgài 人身說概 (Adam Schall / Johann Schreck, early 17th c.) — alongside Wáng Qīngrèn’s 王清任 Yīlín gǎicuò 醫林改錯 (1830) — to test, defend, and where necessary revise the Língshū anatomy.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source _000 opens directly with the substantive essay “Shū Rénshēn túshuō hòu” 書《人身圖說》後 (“After the Description of the Human Body”), which is the de facto programmatic statement of the work: Wáng Xuéquán responds to Yú Lǐchū 俞理初 (Yú Zhèngxiè 俞正燮, 1775–1840) and his Guǐsì lèigǎo 癸巳類稿 essay on the Rénshēn túshuō. Yú had argued that the Westerners’ visceral anatomy was simply different from the Chinese — that Western people are biologically distinct, with the heart on the left, six lobes of intestine etc. Wáng Xuéquán rejects this, showing that Yú had read the Rénshēn túshuō carelessly: the Jesuit text does not say the heart is located on the left; the position is rhetorical, referring to where the heartbeat is most strongly felt. Wáng cross-checks against Wáng Qīngrèn’s dissection-derived observations of “more than thirty Chinese cadavers” and against the Jesuit Rénshēn shuōgài, demonstrating point-by-point that the alleged “Chinese / Western anatomical differences” cited by Yú are misreadings of the source texts. The text mentions that Wáng borrowed the Rénshēn shuōgài and Yīlín gǎicuò from “Qiánzhāi” 潛齋 — the studio name of Wáng Shìxióng, who would later edit and print this very text.
Abstract
Wáng Xuéquán 王學權 was a Qiánlóng / Jiā-qìng-era physician of Hǎiníng 海寧 (Zhèjiāng), great-grandfather of 王士雄 Wáng Shìxióng (1808–1868) and the founder of the Wáng-family medical lineage. The Chóngqìngtáng suíbǐ records his mature reflections on canonical doctrine, materia medica, and — most distinctively — on the comparative anatomy of the Chinese medical canon and the Jesuit anatomical literature. Composition window 1808–1855 reflects the inferred dating: Wáng Xuéquán’s death falls in the late Jiāqìng / early Dàoguāng (he is alluded to as deceased by the time of Wáng Mèngyīng’s 1855 print), but the engagement with Wáng Qīngrèn’s 1830 Yīlín gǎicuò requires that part of the text post-dates that publication, so the work was probably revised across the early 19th century. The work survives in the form edited by Wáng Mèngyīng in 1855 (Hinrichs/Barnes 2013: 16776) — i.e., the received text is a zēngjiào (augmented-and-collated) recension by the great-grandson, who added his own comments and reorganised the notebook for press.
Historiographically the Chóngqìngtáng suíbǐ is a key primary source for two topics: (i) the pre-Opium-War Chinese reception of Jesuit anatomy, a subject usually treated through the prism of Wáng Qīngrèn’s iconoclasm — Wáng Xuéquán shows that the Jesuit anatomical texts were being seriously read in medical circles a generation before Wáng Qīngrèn, and read more carefully than the Chinese popular-philosophy treatments of the same material; and (ii) the Wáng-family transmission and the genesis of the Mènghé / Wēnbìng synthesis — Wáng Mèngyīng’s editorial activities on his ancestor’s manuscript document the formation of his own intellectual position. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial English-language translation of Chóng-qìng-táng suí-bǐ located. The text is cited in the standard secondary literature on the Sino-Jesuit anatomical encounter: see Daniel Asen, Death in Beijing: Murder and Forensic Science in Republican China (Cambridge, 2016); Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014); and Hinrichs and Barnes, Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History (Harvard / Belknap, 2013), which lists the 1855 / 1999 Wáng Shì-xióng yī-xué quán-shū edition. Modern PRC critical edition: Wáng Shì-xióng (ed.), Chóng-qìng-táng suí-bǐ, in Wáng Shì-xióng yī-xué quán-shū (Beijing: Zhōng-guó zhōng-yī-yào chū-bǎn-shè, 1999).
Links
- Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū (hxwd) repatriation series entry.
- Person notes 王學權, 王士雄, 俞正燮 (Yú Lǐchū; the Guǐsì lèigǎo author rebutted in the opening essay), 王清任 (whose Yīlín gǎicuò Wáng Xuéquán read against the Jesuit anatomical texts).
- Companion works: see 王士雄 person note for the full Wáng Mèngyīng corpus.