Fāng zhèng huì yào 方症會要
Essentials of Formula and Presentation Gathered Together by 吳邁書 Wú Màishū (of GǔHī Fēngnán 古歙豐南, mid-Qián-lóng), based on the manuscript notebooks of his late father.
About the work
A four-juǎn clinical formulary compiled posthumously by Wú Màishū from the manuscript materials of his father — a hereditary physician of Hīzhōu / Ānhuī who, in Wú’s preface narrative, “embraced the project of benefitting the common people” (利濟為懷) but did not himself print his medical writings. The work pairs disease-categories with selected formulae, arranged by class (析類分門), and is presented by the filial Wú both as a tribute to the late father and as a portable handbook for the travelling physician — “convenient for the inn or the road” (旅邸道途束裝甚便). The compiler’s framing is unusually personal: Wú admits in the preface that his own medical study has been driven by his weak constitution and that he himself benefited from his father’s prescriptions; the work is therefore the posthumous publication of a private clinical inheritance rather than an original scholarly synthesis.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt preserves Wú Màishū’s preface, signed Qiánlóng bǐngzǐ mùchūn zhī chū gǔHī Fēngnán Wú Màishū yú Xīxiāng shūwū 乾隆丙子暮春之初古歙豐南吳邁書於溪香書屋 — late spring of Qiánlóng bǐngzǐ = 1756. Wú narrates that his father was constitutionally robust, did not personally take medicine, but devoted his whole attention to clinical study; that he himself was weak and frequently ill, and that he tested his father’s formulae against his own complaints with good effect; and that, after his father’s death and the dispersal of the family library, he gathered the remaining manuscript materials into this work so that the family medical tradition might not be lost.
Abstract
Wú Màishū’s biographical detail is otherwise unrecovered; he was a hereditary physician of Hīzhōu (the Anhui prefecture that produced a remarkable density of mid-Qīng medical authors, including 江秋 Jiāng Qiū of nearby Wùyuán). The work belongs to the Hīzhōu medical-pedagogical tradition that produced the Yīshù 醫述 of 程杏軒 Chéng Xìngxuān (KR3er058) and a number of similar regional clinical compilations. The Qián-lóng-era dating is secured by the dated preface. The work is preserved in the Hǎiwài huíliú zhōngyī gǔjí cóngshū through Japanese collections.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. The Hī-zhōu medical tradition is treated in Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007), and is the subject of Wú Yǐ-zhī’s 吳以哲 several Chinese-language studies of the Xīn-ān yī-xué 新安醫學 (the Xīn-ān = Hī-zhōu medical lineage).
Links
- Person note 吳邁書.