Yīyī xiǎo cǎo 醫醫小草
A Little Plant for Doctoring the Doctors by 寶輝 Bǎo Huī (hào Yùshān 玉珊; late-Qīng physician).
About the work
A one-juǎn clinical-doctrinal essay collection by Bǎo Huī (the title plays on the modest “xiǎo cǎo” = “little plant”, as the herb is to the human, so the author’s contribution is to the medical canon). The title also marks the work as a contribution to the late-Qīng yīyī genre — yīyī “doctoring the doctors” — that flourished from Xú Dàchūn’s Yīxué yuánliú lùn on, in which a physician writes for other physicians to correct contemporary practice. Bǎo Huī’s text moves through the standard clinical topics (wǔyùn liùqì five-cyclical-six-qì cosmology, qīqíng jiǔhòu seven-affects-nine-pulse-positions, zàngfǔ visceral systems, jīngluò meridian-source, yīnyáng biànhuà, qìxuè circulation, fāngyào prescription), but with a deliberately wide doctrinal range, drawing on Hàn through Qīng physicians without being captive to any one school.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source _000 preserves two prefaces. (i) The first is dated 光緒二十有七年歲次辛丑季夏初吉 = Guǎngxù 27 = 1901, late summer, first auspicious day, signed “Yànyú dì Chūnyún Zhuó Qīngfǔ bàixù” 硯愚弟春云倬清甫拜敘 (“respectfully prefaced by your inkstone-fool brother Chūnyún Zhuó, zì Qīngfǔ”). The author’s identity is given as “Yùshān Bǎo jūn” 玉刪寶君 (the yùshān 刪 character looks like a graphic-variant slip for the second preface’s standard yùshān 珊; we preserve the slip and note it here). The preface frames the author as one who néng yī shì, yòu néng yī yī “can heal the world, and can also doctor the doctors”. (ii) The second preface opens with the Sūn Sīmiǎo Qiānjīn yàofāng programmatic statement that a dà yī must master the LíngSù, the Jiǎyǐ, the Míngtáng, the Liúzhù, Běncǎo, Yàoduì, and the canonical fāng literature, and also the Yīnyáng lùmìng divinatory arts — and laments that today’s xuánhú zhě liú (physicians of the hanging-gourd) know only a little drug-lore, never having opened the Nèijīng, Nánjīng, Shānghán, or Jīnguì. The second preface defends Bǎo’s project as a remedy for this superficiality.
Abstract
Bǎo Huī 寶輝, hào Yùshān 玉珊, was a late-Qīng physician. The surname Bǎo 寶 is rare in Hàn-Chinese genealogy and most commonly an abbreviated Manchu Bannerman name; given the context of late-Qīng Běijīng / capital-region medical writing, Bǎo Huī was probably a Manchu Bannerman physician, but the prefaces give no native-place. The catalog meta gives dynasty as 清. Composition window 1895–1901 reflects the 1901 first-preface date and the inferred period of composition. The work’s late-Qīng date and yīyī genre place it in the same intellectual moment as Zhōu Xuéhǎi’s Dúyī suíbǐ (KR3eq083, 1898).
The work is one of the more eclectic late-Qīng yīyī texts: where 周學海 Zhōu Xuéhǎi’s Dúyī suíbǐ presents itself as evidential-philological reading-notes and where 王士雄’s Suíxījū output is doctrinally focused on the Wēnbìng synthesis, Bǎo Huī aims for a broad-eclectic correction of late-Qīng professional incompetence, neither aligned with a single school nor explicitly polemical. The work is less-studied in the secondary literature than its Hangzhou and Wúmén contemporaries but is a useful representative of the late-Qīng Běi (capital-region) medical voice. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Yī-yī xiǎo cǎo located. For the late-Qīng yī-yī genre as a vehicle for professional self-criticism see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014), and Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011).