Yīxué shí zài yì 醫學實在易
Medical Learning Is Genuinely Easy by 陳念祖 Chén Niànzǔ (zì Xiūyuán 修園, 1753–1823), the late-Qīng Fújiàn master physician and most prolific medical writer of the Jiāqìng era.
About the work
An eight-juǎn didactic medical handbook framed by its title as a programmatic refutation of the conventional view that medicine is nán yán 難言 (“hard to speak of”). Chén’s argument, developed in the preface, is that the apparent difficulty of medicine results from the coexistence of patterns and the multiplicity of formulae but that the underlying disease-states can in fact be reduced to a small set of clinical shízài 實在 (“genuinely real”) features that the physician can identify with reasonable certainty. The work organises Chinese medical doctrine under the rubric of (1) eight cardinal pulses (浮, 沈, 遲, 數, 細, 大, 短, 長) and (2) eight cardinal symptom-categories (表, 里, 寒, 熱, 虛, 實, 衰, 盛). Each clinical entry is presented as a tight didactic unit pairing a clinical-pattern characterisation with a memorisable verse (詩) and a concise treatment-formula. The work is one of the most influential late-Qīng didactic medical primers and was a standard text in the late-Qīng / Republican-period apprentice-physician training.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with the preface of Xú Yòushù 徐又庶 (hào Qiǎnshí dàorén 淺識道人), who frames Chén’s didactic project as a deliberate “demystification” of medicine — Chén’s pedagogical strategy is to appear to make medicine easy in order to lure the apprentice physician into deep study, but in fact “having read it long, one comes to understand that disease has fixed names, formula has fixed methods, drug has special powers, and all return to the shízài” (讀之久，始知病有定名，方有定法，藥有專能，一一皆歸於「實者」). Xú narrates the work’s composition history: Chén was serving as a magistrate in the Jīfǔ 畿輔 (the Zhílì / Hebei region near the capital) when serious floods occurred in Héngshān and the population subsequently suffered cold-epidemic disease; Chén distributed his prescriptions and saved many lives. The Chinese-medicine-doyen governor Wāng Jiāmén 汪稼門 of Jiāngsū approved the work and arranged for its broader publication. Chén’s second visit to the Jīfǔ region produced the present recension, completed in twenty days (兩旬而成此書) and “vastly differing from earlier compositions” (與前著迥殊). Phasing: the Yīxué shízàiyì was completed in 1808 (Jiāqìng 13) and printed shortly thereafter.
Abstract
Chén Niànzǔ (Xiūyuán; CBDB 81917, 1753–1823) was the most prolific late-Qīng medical writer; his standard collected works Chén Xiūyuán yīshū qīshíèr zhǒng 陳修園醫書七十二種 became the standard popular-medical reference of the late Qīng. His other principal works include the KR3er059 Yīxué sānzì jīng 醫學三字經 — the most-memorised medical primer of the late Qīng — and many didactic Shānghán-revisionist works. The Yīxué shízàiyì was repeatedly reprinted through the late Qīng. CBDB 81917 gives his lifedates 1753–1823.
Translations and research
For Chén Niàn-zǔ and the late-Qīng didactic medical-primer genre see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007); Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine 1850–1960 (UBC, 2014). No comprehensive European-language translation of the Yī-xué shí-zài-yì located.
Links
- Chén Xiūyuán (zh.wikipedia)
- Person note 陳念祖.
- Cf. the rest of the Chén Niànzǔ corpus: KR3er059 Yīxué sānzì jīng.