Mài zhèng zhì fāng 脈症治方
Pulse, Presentation, Treatment, and Formula by 吳正倫 Wú Zhènglún (hào Chūnyán 春嚴, mid-Míng).
About the work
A four-juǎn clinical handbook organised under the four-pillar màizhèngzhìfāng rubric — “examine the pulse, ascertain the presentation, decide the treatment, then fix the formula” (按脈審症 ， 因症辨治 ， 而後定方). Together with the related Yuán-attributed Màiyīnzhèngzhì 脈因證治 (KR3er010), the work establishes the four-pillar template that became canonical in late-imperial clinical pedagogy. Wú’s treatment differs from the Dānxī recension in placing the pulse first and the formula last — making the work the more clinically applicable of the two compilations. Each disease-category is treated under the four headings, with strong influence of Wú’s SòngJīnYuán sources (especially Zhū Dānxī, Lǐ Dōngyuán, and Wáng Hǎicáng 王好古) and his teacher Lù Shēngyě 陸聲野 of Pínghú 平湖.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with a postface (bá 跋) by Wú’s great-great-grandson Zhìchí 志持 (元孫, “fifth-generation descendant”), narrating the family medical lineage in detail. The first ancestor Wú Chūnyán was orphaned and poor; his love of books and study of medicine under Lù Shēngyě of Pínghú produced four works (Huórén xīnjiàn 活人心鑑, Xūchē lù 虛車錄, Yǎngshēng lèiyào 養生類要, and the present Màizhèngzhìfāng). Of these only the Yǎngshēng lèiyào had been printed in Chūnyán’s own lifetime; the rest were preserved in family manuscript. Chūnyán died young (zú nián wèi sìshí 卒年未四十), reportedly at the hands of Imperial Academy of Medicine rivals during a Běijīng visit. The postface narrates how Zhìchí, with the assistance of his elder cousin Wú Tiānshì 吳天士, finally brought the Màizhèngzhìfāng to publication.
Abstract
Wú Zhènglún (CBDB 684442) is recorded with the zì and lineage information consistent with the family postface; his lifedates are not securely datable but the zú nián wèi sìshí qualifier — “died before forty” — combined with the late-Míng publication transmission, suggests a flourishing in the Wànlì era (1573–1620). The work’s composition is therefore bracketed at this range. The mention of Wú’s death at the hands of imperial medical-court rivals in the postface is a striking detail of late-Míng medical sociology — the Tàiyī yuàn 太醫院 was indeed riven by factional disputes in the late sixteenth century — but the historicity of the specific narrative is not independently corroborated. The work is preserved in the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū repatriation series from Japanese collections.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. The mid-Míng mài-zhèng-zhì-fāng four-pillar genre is briefly treated in Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007).