Yīxué zhēnchuán 醫學真傳
The True Transmission of Medical Learning by 高世栻 Gāo Shìshì (zì Shìzōng 士宗, c. 1637 – c. 1697, Qiántáng 錢塘 / Hangzhou); recorded by disciples and published posthumously.
About the work
A one-juǎn posthumous record of Gāo Shìzōng’s catechetical teaching on medical doctrine — the zhēnchuán 真傳 (“true transmission”) of his disciples’ editorial title. The work is presented as a Q&A protocol: each chapter opens with a disciple’s question on a doctrinal point (the relations of yīn and yáng, of xuè and qì, of zàngfǔ and jīngluò, of the wǔyùn liùqì 五運六氣), Gāo responds, and the disciples take notes (jímén shǒulù 及門手錄). The collected protocols were then condensed and put into print by his disciples shortly after his death. The doctrinal positioning is explicitly classical-restorationist: Gāo argues that the zhèngxué 正學 of medicine reaches from Shénnóng and the Yellow Emperor through Zhāng Zhòngjǐng and is then “lost in transmission” after Zhòngjǐng, with the later masters (Dānxī, Dōngyuán, etc.) treated as supplementary rather than authoritative. Gāo’s polemic against the contemporary tendency to overprescribe purgative or cooling agents — his account of the death of the prefacer Yáo Yuǎn’s young child from over-aggressive treatment of measles — is one of the work’s most pointed clinical-ethical interventions.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries two substantial prefaces: (i) the disciple-preface of Wáng Jiā (王嘉, zì Sìzǐ 嗣子, hào Jiā 佳) of Qiántáng, dated Kāngxī jǐmǎo 康熙己卯 = 1699 (spring); Wáng narrates that Gāo summoned his disciples in his late years for daily catechetical instruction, that the disciples took down the master’s responses (jímén shǒulù 及門手錄), and that the resulting collection was edited and put into print under the title Yīxué zhēnchuán; (ii) the reprint preface of Yáo Yuǎn 姚遠 (zì Shènggōng 聖功), also of Qiántáng, dated Kāngxī gēngyín 康熙庚寅 = 1710 (second month), which gives the painful autobiographical narrative of Yáo’s having lost a son to incompetent paediatric care in the previous year — a death he attributed, on reading Gāo’s chapter on measles in the original 1699 printing, to the very over-purgation and over-cooling Gāo had warned against — and undertaking the reprint as an act of restorative public service.
Abstract
Gāo Shìshì was a Qiántáng (Hangzhou) physician of the second half of the 17th century, a disciple of the local Língshū 靈樞 / Sùwèn commentator 張志聰 Zhāng Zhìcōng (Yǐnān 隱庵), and one of the central figures of the early-Qīng Qiántáng Yīshū huìbù 醫書匯部 commentarial school. Gāo’s lifedates are not securely documented; the conventional bracket in modern reference works is c. 1637 – c. 1697. The 1699 Wáng Jiā preface to the present work is the principal terminus ante quem.
Gāo’s other extant works include his Sùwèn jízhù 素問集註 (collaboratively with Zhāng Zhìcōng) and the Sùwèn zhíjiě 素問直解 (KR3a0006?). The Yīxué zhēnchuán is his only original (non-commentarial) work and is the principal direct witness to his oral teaching.
The hxwd recension descends from a Japanese reprinting of the 1710 second edition. CBDB entry 438036 carries Gāo’s name without dates.
Translations and research
No substantial European-language secondary literature located. For the early-Qīng Qián-táng commentarial circle of which Gāo was a member see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics (Routledge, 2011); Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition (Eastland, 2007).