Yīyī ǒulù 醫醫偶錄
Random Records for Healing the Healers by 陳念祖 Chén Niànzǔ (zì Xiūyuán 修園, 1753–1823, Chánglè 長樂 / Fújiàn).
About the work
A two-juǎn late-Qiānlóng / Jiāqìng didactic medical handbook by Chén Xiūyuán, organised as a zàngfǔ-by-zàngfǔ (organ-by-organ) systematic exposition of the xūshí 虛實 (deficiency / excess) presentations of each principal organ, with the canonical prescription appended to each pattern. The work is structured as a systematic Q&A in the established Chén Xiūyuán pedagogical voice, with the zàng (lung, heart, liver, spleen, kidney) and fǔ (large intestine, small intestine, gall-bladder, stomach, bladder, triple-burner) each given a fixed-format clinical exposition: position in the body and physiology; xū patterns and their formulae; shí patterns and their formulae. The title — “Healing the Healers” — frames the work as an intervention into the clinical-pedagogical literature rather than a primer for the lay reader: the implied audience is the practising physician whose own clinical reasoning has gone astray.
The hxwd recension opens (in _000.txt) with an Fùlù 附錄 (appendix) of six Confucian-moral Píngrén yánnián yàojué 平人延年要訣 (“Essentials for the ordinary person’s longevity”) — covering cúnxīn 存心 (preserving the heart-mind), dūnběn 敦本 (honouring the root, i.e. filial piety), and four further classical-moral injunctions — that Chén holds out as “in place of medicine and acupuncture” (代藥石針砭) for the ordinary person whose health does not need pharmacological intervention.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt opens directly with the Fùlù (longevity-essentials appendix) and does not preserve Chén’s substantive author-preface, which in the standard text dates the work to Jiāqìng 17 / 1812. The body of the zàngfǔ exposition begins in _001.txt with the appended dialogue piece “Shí yī zì biàn kě wéi yī shuō” 識一字便可為醫說 — an extended philosophical reflection on the character rén 人 as the calligraphic compound of piě 丿 (yáng) and nà 乀 (yīn), and the consequent doctrine of yīnyáng interdependence — which is also appended to Chén’s Yīxué sānzì jīng (KR3er059) and is one of his most-anthologised short texts.
Abstract
The Yīyī ǒulù belongs to Chén Xiūyuán’s late-life Yīxué cóngshū 醫學叢書 corpus and is conventionally dated to 1812 (Jiāqìng 17), placing it between the Yīxué sānzì jīng of 1804 (KR3er059) and Chén’s Shānghán lùn qiǎnzhù / Jīnguì yàolüè qiǎnzhù commentarial works of the later 1810s. The work is the most clinically practical of Chén’s primers — its zàngfǔ matrix gives a complete clinical-pattern reference compatible with the rest of his curriculum.
The hxwd recension descends from a Japanese reprinting. The work was repeatedly reprinted in the late Qīng and Republican era as part of the standard Chén Xiūyuán cóngshū curriculum.
Translations and research
No European-language translation of the Yī-yī ǒu-lù located. For Chén Xiū-yuán’s classical-restoration medical pedagogy see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition (Eastland, 2007), ch. 4; Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics (Routledge, 2011).