Wáng Lètíng zhǐyào 王樂亭指要
Wang Leting’s Essentials by 王樂亭 Wáng Lètíng (late-Qīng Sūzhōu / Wúmén physician).
About the work
A four-juǎn clinical casebook (yīàn) of late-Qīng Wú-mén-region practice, attributed to Wáng Lètíng 王樂亭. The catalog meta gives no author; the title carries the author’s name. The Kanripo source consists of juǎn 1–4 (_001–_004) without a separate _000 front-matter file, so no preserved preface or postface is available. The cases follow the standard Wúmén casebook convention: each case is headed by the patient’s surname plus zuǒ 左 (male, “left”) or yòu 右 (female, “right”) — e.g. Jiǎng Zuǒ 蔣左, Sū Yòu 蘇右, Yáng Zuǒ 楊左, Wú Zuǒ 吳左 — followed by a brief presenting-complaint narrative, the àn (diagnostic discussion) in literary-medical prose, and the prescription with dose-by-dose dosages. Multi-consultation cases (yòu zhěn “second consultation”, yòu “again”, etc.) preserve the evolution of the prescription as the disease responds.
Juǎn 1 opens with time-pathological / acute-febrile topics: shíxié 時邪 (seasonal evils), fēngwēn 風溫 (wind-warm — including the heavy dàtóuwēn 大頭瘟 ‘big-head pestilence’ case-class), xiéxiàn xīnyíng 邪陷心營 (pathogen sunk into the cardiac construction-level — a Wēnbìng-school category, treated with xījiǎo rhinoceros-horn and jiājiǎn zhúyè huángqí tāng 加減竹葉黃耆湯), nüè malaria. The work is a classical late-Qīng Sūzhōu yīàn, doctrinally aligned with the Wēnbìng synthesis of Yè Tiānshì → Wáng Mèngyīng.
Abstract
Wáng Lètíng 王樂亭 was a late-Qīng Sūzhōu / Wúmén physician. The catalog meta supplies only the title and the hxwd source, no author or date; the work’s clinical voice — sophisticated Wēnbìng-school prescribing, the zuǒ/yòu convention, the use of xījiǎo, the integration of YīngWèi / Sānjiāo doctrine into the prescription rationale — places the text squarely in the mid-to-late-19th-century Sūzhōu medical scene, somewhere between the climax of Wáng Mèngyīng’s career (1850s–60s) and the late-Qīng Mènghé output. Composition window 1830–1880 is the defensible inference.
(Important note for disambiguation: the late-Qīng Sūzhōu Wáng Lètíng of this text is not to be confused with the much-better-known modern Běijīng acupuncturist Wáng Lètíng 王樂亭 (1895–1984), founder of the Lóujīn fǎ 五龍針法 lineage. The two are entirely separate figures of different periods, regions, and clinical traditions.)
The work is a useful primary source for the late-Qīng Sūzhōu Wēnbìng clinical idiom in its mature form — particularly the integration of xījiǎo-bearing high-mortality acute febrile prescriptions into routine practice, and the careful dosing strategies that allowed Wúmén physicians to administer such drugs at the high doses recorded in the present cases without doing the kind of damage the yīyī polemicists of the same period attacked (cf. KR3eq084, KR3eq091). The text deserves more attention than it has received in the secondary literature. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Wáng Lè-tíng zhǐ-yào located. For the Sū-zhōu / Wú-mén Wēn-bìng casebook idiom in the mid-to-late 19th century, see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011); Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007), with particular reference to the Mèng-hé-Sū-zhōu medical economy in the period.
Links
- Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū (hxwd) repatriation series entry.
- Person note 王樂亭.