Míngyī zhǐzhǎng 明醫指掌
A Compass-in-the-Palm for the Discerning Physician by 皇甫中 Huángfǔ Zhōng (hào Yúnzhōu 雲洲, late-Míng physician of Sūjùn 蘇郡 / Suzhou); revised and supplemented by 邵行甫 Shào Xíngfǔ.
About the work
A late-Míng didactic medical handbook in ten juǎn, structured around three pedagogical forms — fù 賦 (rhymed prose-poem), gē 歌 (mnemonic song), and lùn 論 (analytic discussion) — covering pulse-diagnosis, channel-network, the six seasonal qì, and the major clinical categories of internal medicine, women’s medicine, and paediatrics. The work is explicitly modelled on Wú Méngzhāi 吳蒙齋’s Shānghán zhǐzhǎng tú 傷寒指掌圖 (a Cold-damage primer), which it generalises to the whole of internal medicine and from which it borrows both the “compass-in-the-palm” (zhǐzhǎng 指掌) title-metaphor and the tripartite fù/gē/lùn structure. The first juǎn opens with a “general digest of classical doctrine” (Jīnglùn zǒngchāo 經論總抄) — an editorial extract of essential passages from the Sùwèn, Língshū, Nánjīng, and the JīnYuán four masters — followed by 龔信 Gōng Yúnlín’s Yàoxìng gē 藥性歌 (mnemonic verse on materia medica). The body of the work then proceeds disease-category by disease-category, with each category structured as: rhymed-prose problem statement → pulse-diagnostic mnemonic → analytic exposition → formulary.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens with the preface of 許士柔 Xǔ Shìróu (jìnshì of Tiānqǐ 1 / 1621, then Hànlín shùjíshì 翰林庶吉士 of the Sūjùn 蘇郡 home prefecture), dated Tiānqǐ rénxū 天啟壬戌 = 1622 (“龍飛天啟壬戌菊月朔旦”). Xǔ narrates that Huángfǔ Zhōng was a “third-generation good physician” (三世良醫) of Yúnzhōu, that the work was revised and supplemented in Xǔ’s own generation by Shào Xíngfǔ — the son of Niànshānwēng 念山翁, a failed examination-candidate-turned-physician of the Fēngxī 葑溪 (Suzhou) district — and that Shào sent the manuscript to Xǔ in Běijīng, where Xǔ was serving as shùjíshì. Xǔ saw the work into print. The fánlì 凡例 (editorial guidelines, ten items) immediately follows the preface and lays out the work’s pedagogical principles.
Abstract
The composition of the original Míngyī zhǐzhǎng is conventionally placed in the Wànlì 萬曆 era (later 16th c.) on the strength of Huángfǔ Zhōng’s fúzǐ 浮子 (floating-son) status in the Suzhou medical community; the surviving recension is, however, Shào Xíngfǔ’s 1622 revised redaction, with which the work entered the printed tradition. We follow the 1622 dating, which represents the received text.
Huángfǔ Zhōng is otherwise unattested in CBDB and in the standard Míng bibliographic catalogues; Xǔ Shìróu’s preface is in fact the principal biographical source. The work circulated in the late Míng and Qīng under the Shào revision and was preserved in Japanese collections; the hxwd recension is the modern repatriation from the Japanese line.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. For the late-Míng pedagogical-handbook genre — of which this work is a representative late example — see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2011), and Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007).