Quán tǐ bìng yuán lèi zuǎn 全體病源類纂
A Topical Compendium on the Origins of the Diseases of the Whole Body Anonymous (with editorial annotations signed Qiān àn 謙按 — author’s zì / hào unidentified, late Qīng).
About the work
A medical compendium of disease aetiology organised by the five-viscera / six-bowels (五藏六府) framework, surveying each organ in turn — beginning with the liver (肝藏說), liver-disease, and the various sub-classes of liver-pathology drawn from the Sùwèn, Língshū, Nánjīng, Jīnguì, and later commentators. The work is a lèizuǎn 類纂 (“topically gathered compilation”) rather than an original treatise: it digests the canonical Chinese medical literature on disease origin from the Nèijīng through the Jīn–Yuán four masters and the Míng–Qīng synthesisers into a single per-organ classification, with the compiler’s own brief annotations under the standing marker Qiān àn 謙按 (“Qiān remarks:”) interleaved between the citations. The compiler shows clear influence of both Western anatomical knowledge — the opening description of the liver as “上面隆凸，下面凹陷，分左右兩大扇，貼於橫膈膜下” (with a convex upper surface, concave below, divided into two great lobes attached beneath the diaphragm) is anatomically Westernised in a way unthinkable before late-Qīng exposure to Western anatomy — and of the Qīng medical-encyclopaedic synthesis of 沈金鰲 Shěn Jīnáo, whose Zábìng yuánliú xīzhú 雜病源流犀燭 (KR3er109 Shěnshì zūnshēngshū) is repeatedly cited as the standing authority on per-organ pathology.
Abstract
The work bears no surviving author preface or colophon in the hxwd transmission; internal evidence (the Westernised anatomical description, the citation of Shěn Jīnáo’s 1773 Zábìng yuánliú xīzhú) places the compilation in the late Qīng — sometime between Shěn’s death (1776) and the end of the dynasty (1911), and most probably in the second half of the nineteenth century when Western anatomical literature was beginning to circulate in Chinese medical circles (the parallel cases of KR3er117 Jiǎnmíng zhōngxī huìcān yīxué túshuō of Wáng Yǒuzhōng, 1906, and KR3er118 Zàngfǔ zhèngzhì túshuō rénjìngjīng are diagnostic for this late-Qīng Sino-Western medical-synthesis genre). The compiler’s identity (signed only as Qiān 謙) is not recoverable from the source. The work is preserved in the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū 海外回流中醫古籍叢書 series and was apparently rare even at the time of its composition, since no Republican-period reprint or modern punctuated edition has been located.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. For the late-Qīng Sino-Western anatomical-medical synthesis to which this work belongs, see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine 1850–1960 (Vancouver: UBC, 2014), ch. 2; and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (Chicago, 2014), introduction.