Yīxué dúshū zhì 醫學讀書志
Treatise on Medical Reading by 曹禾 Cáo Hé (hào Jīān 畸庵; mid-19th-century Yánghú / Chángzhōu physician-bibliographer).
About the work
A two-juǎn (99-essay) historical-bibliographic survey of Chinese medical literature by Cáo Hé, organised by dynasty (Hàn through Qīng) with running counts of titles-and-juan and biographical-bibliographic notes on each major medical author. The opening matter sets the programme: the medical jiǎnjí 簡籍 (slip-codex) — i.e. the cumulative archive of the medical tradition — is to be surveyed dynastically with quantitative attention, drawing on the yìwénzhì / jīngjízhì tradition of the standard histories combined with personal observation of texts in circulation in the mid-19th century. Cáo records the conventional census of the medical tradition by dynasty: Hàn 36 schools / 868 juǎn; Liáng 132 bù / 1201 juǎn; Suí 156 / 4513; Táng míngtáng jīngmài 34 schools / 40 bù / 241 juǎn, yīshù 257 schools / 192 bù / 4454 juǎn; Sòng 508 / 3301; Jīn 36 bù unspecified-juǎn + 1 / 143; Yuán 136 unspecified + 38 / 777; Míng 98 unspecified + 19 / 1262; Qīng 196 / 2519; for a total of 1394 bù and 19136 juǎn — a substantial historical-statistical reconstruction of the medical canon.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source _000 preserves a closing bá (postface) by Cáo’s disciple Liú Rǔháng 劉汝航 of Yánghú 陽湖 (Chángzhōu prefecture, Jiāngsū), dated 咸豐元年上巳日 = Xiánfēng 1 / 1851 / Shàngsì (3rd-day-of-3rd-month festival). Liú’s bá situates Cáo’s project: Cáo had initially studied the JīnYuán LiúZhāngLǐZhū (= Liú Wánsù, Zhāng Cóngzhèng, Lǐ Dōngyuán, Zhū Dānxī) plus Lǐzhāi 立齋 (Xuē Jǐ 薛己), Sǔnān 損庵 (Wáng Lún 王綸), and Dōngbì 東壁 (Lǐ Shízhēn 李時珍) traditions, eventually concluded their inadequacies, and turned back to the yījīng (medical classics), jīngfāng (classical prescriptions), Shānghán, and Běncǎo foundational layer. He wrote a Yángyī yǎyán 瘍醫雅言 and a Dòuzhěn suǒyǐn 豆疹索隱, and now the present Dúshū zhì (Reading Treatise) of 99 essays, in which Cáo “yī bǐng xūzhōng, bù xiáo qúnyì” (relies single-mindedly on an empty centre, without confusing the chorus of opinion). Liú frames the work in the Táo Jìngjié 陶靖節 (= Táo Yuānmíng) tradition of “dúshū bù qiú shèn jiě” (reading without forcing exhaustive interpretation) — relying on the tiānzī mǐnjié (innate quickness) that achieves comprehension by holistic absorption rather than line-by-line exegesis.
Abstract
Cáo Hé 曹禾, hào Jīān 畸庵 (“Studio of the Odd-Numbered Hut”), was a mid-19th-century physician and medical bibliographer of Yánghú 陽湖 (Chángzhōu prefecture, Jiāngsū) — to be located socially in the Cháng-zhōu-school jīnwén (New-Text) classicism of Liú Fénglù 劉逢祿 and contemporaries, though his medical writing belongs to the orthodox-classical wing. The catalog meta gives 曹禾 / 清; the dated postface fixes the composition before 1851. Composition window 1840–1851 reflects this. Cáo’s two other works named in Liú’s bá — the Yángyī yǎyán on external medicine and the Dòuzhěn suǒyǐn on smallpox/measles — are also extant in some editions but not in this Kanripo cluster.
The Yīxué dúshū zhì is one of the most useful primary sources for the 19th-century reconstruction of the Chinese medical bibliographic tradition. It anticipates the late-Qīng / Republican formal medical bibliographies (the Cǎotíng yījí kǎo 草亭醫籍考 of Nánjīng’s 中央國醫館, the 20th-century Zhōngyī túshū liánhé mùlù etc.) by half a century, working with the same quantitative method on a less-developed source base. Cáo’s polemical posture — that the JīnYuán synthesis was a wrong turn and that the HànTáng jīngfāng / yījīng layer is the proper foundation — places him at the leading edge of the late-Qīng fùgǔ 復古 (return-to-antiquity) medical movement that would dominate the late-Qīng / early-Republican Chinese-medical theoretical scene. Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language translation of Yī-xué dú-shū zhì located. For the late-Imperial Chinese medical bibliographic tradition see Paul U. Unschuld, Medicine in China: Historical Artifacts and Images (Prestel, 2000), and Paul U. Unschuld and Jinsheng Zheng, Chinese Traditional Healing: The Berlin Collection of Manuscript Volumes from the 16th through the Early 20th Century (Brill, 2012). For the 19th-century fù-gǔ medical movement see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014); for the Cháng-zhōu New-Text intellectual milieu surrounding Cáo, the classic study is On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Hawaii, 2005).