Wàn bìng huí chūn 萬病回春
Restoring Spring to the Ten Thousand Diseases by 龔廷賢 Gōng Tíngxián (zì Zǐcái 子才, hào Yúnlín 雲林, c. 1522 – c. 1619).
About the work
An eight-juǎn synthetic medical compendium — Gōng Tíngxián’s best-known and most-widely-circulated work, covering internal medicine, gynaecology, pediatrics, and external medicine under a unified clinical framework that drew on the family tradition (the Gǔjīn yījiàn KR3er037 of his father Gōng Xìn) and on the broader late-Míng medical synthesis. The title metaphor — wànbìng huíchūn “ten thousand diseases brought back to spring” — frames the physician as the agent who restores the patient’s vital warmth and life-force (“spring”) after the bleak winter of disease. The work is organised by disease-category, with each entry presenting aetiology, pulse-pattern, presentation, and a graded series of formulae. Particularly notable is the work’s strong endorsement of warming-tonifying (wēnbǔ 溫補) therapeutics — Gōng was a key intermediary between the mid-Míng Xuē Jǐ tradition and the late-Míng Zhāng Jièbīn / Zhào Xiànkě Mìngmén school.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with the hòuxù 後序 (postface) of the Míng imperial-clansman Zhōufán Hǎiyáng wáng Kūnhú Qíntóng 周藩海陽王崑湖勤炵 — a prince of the Hǎiyáng line of the Zhōufán 周藩 imperial enfeoffment — dated Wànlì shíliù nián suì cì wùzǐ mèngqiū zhī jí 萬曆十六年歲次戊子孟秋之吉 = early autumn of Wànlì 16 = August 1588. The prince narrates his own clinical biography: he had received the dukedom in Jiājìng bǐngchén (1556) and had subsequently been afflicted by chronic tánhuǒ 痰火 (phlegm-and-fire) disease for thirty years, until in Wànlì bǐngxū (1586) his elder son Cháoshēng 朝陞 had sought out and engaged Gōng Tíngxián, who restored the prince to full health within sixty days. Gōng then presented the prince with his two earlier works (Gǔjīn yījiàn and Zhǒngxìng xiānfāng 種杏仙方) and subsequently completed and presented the Wànbìng huíchūn. The prince’s postface frames the work in the Sīmǎ Wēngōng tradition of “good-physician-equal-to-good-minister” (司鼎鼎者務為良相 … 專方脈者務為良醫).
Abstract
The composition was completed in Wànlì 15 (1587) on the basis of the prince’s postface chronology; the first print is Wànlì 16 (1588). The work was repeatedly reprinted in the late Míng and Qīng — at least twenty-eight Chinese editions are recorded — and was carried into Korea and Japan as a major reference work for the Dōngyī bǎojiàn (1613) and the Edo-period Japanese medical tradition. The Edo-period Japanese reception of the work was particularly intensive: it was the principal vehicle by which late-Míng warming-tonifying doctrine entered the Edo gosei-ha 後世派 (post-Sòng school) and was a major target for the kohō-ha 古方派 (return-to-antiquity school) reaction associated with Gotō Konzan 後藤艮山 and Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞 — see KR3eq001 Téngshì yītán for an internal Japanese critique of this dynamic. Gōng’s lifedates (c. 1522 – c. 1619) follow the modern Chinese-medicine consensus.
Translations and research
The Wàn-bìng huí-chūn has been partially translated into German: Carola Beck and Joel Penner, Wan Bing Hui Chun: Ten Thousand Illnesses Back to Spring (Bacopa, 2013, partial translation). For Gōng Tíng-xián and the late-Míng warming-tonifying tradition see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin (California, 1999); Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007). Chinese-language critical edition: Wàn-bìng huí-chūn jiào-zhù 萬病回春校註 (Rénmín wèishēng, 1984).