Chéngfú yīyǐng 乘桴醫影
Medical Shadows from Riding the Raft by 王士雄 Wáng Shìxióng (Mèngyīng 孟英; 1808–1868), the principal late-Qīng Wēnbìng-school physician.
About the work
A one-juǎn late-life autobiographical-medical text by Wáng Mèngyīng. The title Chéngfú yīyǐng — literally “medical shadows [recorded while] riding the raft” — is a Lùnyǔ allusion (chéngfú fú yú hǎi 乘桴浮於海 = “I shall ride a raft and float upon the sea”, Confucius’s resigned formula for retreating from a dysfunctional polity), and frames the work as the autobiographical record of Wáng’s flight from the Tài-píng-war zone of the JiāngZhè plain to refuge in the foreign-administered enclave of Shànghǎi. The text combines (i) autobiographical narrative of the years 1855–1861, (ii) clinical case-records integrated into the flight narrative — Wáng’s friends and family fall ill at successive stops in the journey, and the case-notes record his on-the-road treatments — and (iii) substantive medical doctrinal discussion. It is one of the most historically distinctive medical-personal texts of the entire 19th-century Chinese-medical corpus.
Prefaces
The Kanripo source _000 preserves the text as a single continuous xù (preface-cum-narrative). Wáng begins from the autumn of 乙卯 = Yǐmǎo = Xiánfēng 5 = 1855, when he returned to his native place and composed the Guīyàn lù 歸硯錄 (“Returning-Inkstone Record”, his pre-flight yīhuà); through 庚申 = Gēngshēn = Xiánfēng 10 = 1860 autumn, when his hometown Tíngxī 渟溪 fell to Tàipíng forces; through a sequence of refuge-stops at the village of Púyuàn 濮院 (where he stayed at the home of Dǒng Kūpáo 董枯匏, drafted the Yǐnshí pǔ 飲食譜 and the Jīmíng lù 雞鳴錄 (KR3ed124) “to expel anxiety”); through the fall of Hángzhōu 杭垣 and his hometown 洲城 (“Heaven collapsed, earth split open, there was no road to walk”); through the marriage-off of his daughters to safer locations; through his final flight in the 4th month of Xínyǒu = 辛酉 = 1861 via Méijīng 梅涇 to refuge with his daughter’s in-law family the Yáo 姚 of remote Jiāxīng; to his arrival in Shànghǎi on the 3rd day of the 5th month, where he took shelter at the De-tài Paper Shop 德泰紙號 of Zhōu Cǎishān 周採山 outside the East Gate. Along the way he treats his friends Jìjié 季傑, Xìngchī 性癡, and Ruòqú 若蕖, his clansman-nephew Shàowǔ 紹武, and the critically ill Wáng Wénjiè 王文介 of Tónglú 桐廬 (a wēnxié wùbiǎo — warm-pathogen misdiagnosed as exterior — case successfully reversed). Wáng pointedly observes that Shànghǎi has been transformed into a major cosmopolitan trading port by the past twenty years, and is now refuge for all of JiāngZhè: “Zhōngyuán wǎnrú wàiguó” 中原宛如外國 (“the Central Plain looks like a foreign country”).
Abstract
王士雄 Wáng Shìxióng (Mèngyīng) is the dominant late-Qīng Wēnbìng-school physician. The Chéngfú yīyǐng is his late-life autobiographical Shàng-hǎi-refuge text, dating to 1861–1862 (composition window). The catalog meta gives 王士雄 / 清; the internal dating fixes the work precisely.
Substantively the work is unique among 19th-century Chinese-medical texts in three respects. (i) It is a primary witness to the Tài-píng-war destruction of the JiāngZhè medical economy — the fall of Tíngxī, Hángzhōu, the destruction of Púyuàn, the collapse of the inter-prefectural medical practice network on which the Wúmén / Wēnbìng school had depended; (ii) it documents Wáng Mèngyīng’s relocation to Shànghǎi, the move that would shape the post-Tài-píng Shànghǎi Chinese-medical scene and the founding intellectual moment of what would become the Hǎipài 海派 (Shanghai-school) tradition of modern Chinese medicine; (iii) it integrates clinical case-records into autobiographical narrative at a level of literary control unmatched in the casebook tradition — the friends Wáng treats are the people whose flight he is describing, and the yīàn genre is being used to record a refugee community’s medical experience in real time. The work has been less studied in the secondary literature than Wáng’s Wēnrè jīngwěi and his casebooks proper but is one of the most historically important late-Qīng medical-autobiographical texts.
Translations and research
No substantial English-language translation of Chéng-fú yī-yǐng located. The work is cited in Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011); for the Tài-píng-war disruption of the Jiāng-Zhè medical economy and the Shàng-hǎi refugee period see Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th-Century China (Stanford, 2013); for the post-Tài-píng founding of the Hǎi-pài Chinese-medical tradition see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007); Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 (UBC Press, 2014).
Links
- Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū (hxwd) repatriation series entry.
- Person notes 王士雄, 董枯匏 (the Púyuàn host), 呂慎庵 (the Púyuàn invitation), 陳半樵 (the Shànghǎi invitation), 周採山 (the De-tài Paper Shop host), 王文介 (the wēnxié wùbiǎo case patient).
- Wáng Mèngyīng works composed during the flight: KR3ed124 Jīmíng lù 雞鳴錄, Suíxījū yǐnshí pǔ 隨息居飲食譜 (drafted at Púyuàn); pre-flight: Guīyàn lù 歸硯錄.