Wèishēng bǎojiàn 衛生寶鑑
Precious Mirror for Safeguarding Life by 羅天益 Luó Tiānyì (zì Qiānfǔ 謙甫, fl. mid-13th c. – c. 1290, Zhēndìng 真定 / Héběi).
About the work
A twenty-four-juǎn clinical compendium with a one-juǎn bǔyí 補遺 (later supplement) — the principal pedagogical legacy of 李杲 Lǐ Gǎo (Dōngyuán 東垣, 1180–1251) as transmitted by his direct disciple Luó Tiānyì. The body of the work is organised by clinical category (fēnmén biélèi 分門別類), covering internal and external medicine, paediatrics, women’s medicine, shānghán 傷寒 selectively, zhōngshǔ 中暑 (heat-stroke), zábìng 雜病, and clinical case-records. Each category opens with a brief doctrinal exposition, follows with the standard formula or formulae, and concludes — uniquely among Yuán medical compendia — with verbatim transcriptions of Luó’s own consultation case-records, many of which document patients Luó treated alongside Lǐ Gǎo at the court of the Mongol prince Bóyán 伯顏 and on military campaign. The bǔyí supplement, by a later hand, fills in the gaps in Luó’s Shānghán coverage with formulae drawn from Wáng Shūhé 王叔和, Zhāng Cóngzhèng 張從正, Liú Wánsù 劉完素, and Lǐ Gǎo himself. The work is the most important single conduit through which Lǐ Gǎo’s Píwèi lùn 脾胃論 (KR3e0034) school passed from the late Jīn into the Yuán and through the Yuán into the early Míng.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt preserves the Bǔyí supplement-preface, which explains that Luó’s original work was largely silent on cold-damage (shānghán) on the grounds that the topic was already exhaustively treated in Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Shānghán lùn and its later expositors; the supplement was added by a later editor to make the work more useful as a stand-alone clinical reference in remote regions where complete copies of the Shānghán corpus were not available. The supplement explicitly invokes Zhòngjǐng’s “397 methods, 113 formulae” and Lǐ Dōngyuán’s “early/middle/late internal-damage” framework. The Yuán-era prefaces by 李杲 Lǐ Gǎo’s circle — preserved in the SKQS recension — are not present in the hxwd _000.txt, which reproduces only the supplement.
Abstract
Luó Tiānyì was a native of Zhēndìng 真定 (modern Zhèngdìng 正定, Héběi) and a personal disciple of Lǐ Gǎo. The work is conventionally dated to Zhìyuán 18 / 1281, the date of the Yuán preface noted in Dīng Fúbǎo’s bibliographic notice (CBDB note s.v. Luó Tiānyì). Luó also produced the Nèijīng lèibiān 內經類編 (no longer extant) and is the named recipient of Lǐ Gǎo’s deathbed entrustment of the latter’s writings — making him the editorial channel through which the Píwèi lùn, Nèiwài shāng biànhuò lùn 內外傷辨惑論 (KR3e0033), and Lánshì mìcáng 蘭室秘藏 (KR3er062) reached the printers.
The Wèishēng bǎojiàn enjoyed multiple Yuán, Míng and Qīng reprintings and was included in the Sìkù imperial collection. The hxwd recension is based on a Japanese transmission (an Edo-period reprint of a Míng edition) that preserves a slightly different sequence of materials than the standard Chinese recension; the bǔyí in particular is fuller in the Japanese line.
Translations and research
No complete European-language translation located. The work figures centrally in standard accounts of the Jīn-Yuán four-masters tradition: see Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History 960–1665 (California, 1999); TJ Hinrichs and Linda Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing (Harvard, 2013); and Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas (California, 1985), on Lǐ Dōng-yuán’s Pí-wèi school and its transmission.
Other points of interest
Luó’s clinical case-records embedded in the work are among the earliest extensive yīàn 醫案 (medical case literature) in the Chinese tradition; they document patients of high Mongol-court rank (including the prince Bóyán) by personal name, social position, and presenting symptom, and constitute a valuable source for the social history of Yuán medicine. The case-record genre, which would mature in the Míng under Wāng Jī 汪機 and Jiāng Guàn 江瓘, has one of its principal early Yuán precedents here.
Links
- Luó Tiānyì 羅天益 (zh)
- Person notes 羅天益, 李杲 (teacher).