Yīzōng jǐrèn biān 醫宗己任編
Compilation of “Taking Medicine as One’s Personal Charge” material by 高斗魁 Gāo Dǒukuí (hào Gǔfēng 鼓峰, 1623–1670, Sìmíng 四明 / Níngbō); compiled by 楊乘六 Yáng Chéngliù; supplemented and annotated by 王汝謙 Wáng Rǔqiān (hào Jìngtáng 鏡堂, of Jīngdé 旌德, Ānhuī, fl. 1891).
About the work
An eight-juǎn late-Qīng compendium organised around the clinical case-records and doctrinal notes of the early-Qīng Níngbō physician Gāo Gǔfēng (Gāo Dǒukuí, 1623–1670). The work is conceived under the Fàn Wénzhèng 范文正 (范仲淹) maxim — “If unable to be a worthy minister, then a worthy physician” (異日不為良相，便為良醫) — that gives the work its title: jǐrèn 己任 = “taking [the xià-realm] as one’s personal charge”. The content is structured as a sequence of doctrinal essays (Gāo’s yīnyáng wǔxíng 陰陽五行 and zàngfǔ doctrine), illustrated by Gāo’s own clinical case-records (the Dōngzhuāng yīàn 東莊醫案), accompanied by Gāo’s pulse-diagnostic and pattern-discrimination diagrams. Gāo’s clinical reputation rested on his idiosyncratic eclecticism — equally facile with the Shānghán corpus, with the late-Míng warming-tonifying school, and with the Dānxī cooling-purging tradition — which Wáng Rǔqiān’s 1891 preface explicitly compares to Qín Yuèrén (Biǎnquè 扁鵲) “responding to the time” (隨俗為變).
The body of the work is supplemented by two appended texts not by Gāo Gǔfēng — the Dōngzhuāng yīàn 東莊醫案 (Eastern-Estate Case-Records) and the Xītáng gǎnzhèng 西塘感症 (Western-Pond Treatise on Seasonal Affections) — which are the work of Gāo’s contemporaries and were absorbed into the Yīzōng jǐrèn biān in the compilation phase.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries the 1891 publication preface of 王汝謙 Wáng Rǔqiān, hào Jìngtáng, of Jīngdé 旌德 (Ānhuī), dated Guāngxù 17 / 1891, seventh month, sixteenth day. Wáng narrates: (i) his childhood encounter with Gāo Gǔfēng’s manuscript, in which he found the doctrinal heart of his own subsequent clinical practice; (ii) the loss of his copy in the mid-19th-c. Tàipíng 太平 conflict (“兵燹以來，藏書灰燼”) and his thirty-year quest for a replacement, in which Wáng nevertheless applied Gāo’s methods to dying patients “with eight or nine recoveries in ten”; (iii) the eventual recovery of a damaged copy by Wáng’s disciples from an old bookshop, which Wáng emended and supplemented (bǔjū 補苴) by restoring readable text where the original was abraded, and to which he added marginal méipī 眉批 (head-of-page critical notes) representing his own clinical discussions with his disciples; (iv) the suggestion of his fellow-townsman Lǐ Xiàngchūn 李象春 that the work be put through the press, and the consequent printing.
Abstract
The composition of the core material is securely placed in Gāo Dǒukuí’s lifetime (1623–1670, CBDB 87304); Gāo did not publish in his own lifetime, and the substantive editorial compilation was the work of 楊乘六 Yáng Chéngliù (fl. late 17th – early 18th c., otherwise poorly attested), who collected Gāo’s case-records and doctrinal essays into the eight-juǎn form. The work first reached print in the 18th century but the principal extant recension is the Guāngxù 17 / 1891 supplemented and annotated edition of Wáng Rǔqiān, on which the hxwd recension descends through a Japanese reprinting.
CBDB lists a Wáng Rǔqiān with dates 1777–1855 (id 71621), which is too early for the 1891 preface — the 1891 prefacer of Jīngdé must be a different Wáng Rǔqiān (one of the unspecified records at 209902, 314226, or 555447) or, more likely, a fourth Wáng Rǔqiān not yet recorded in CBDB. The 1891 prefacer signs as a Jīngdé local of Guāngxù-era clinical reputation.
The work’s date-bracket here (1670–1891) reflects the substantial editorial gulf between Gāo’s original composition and Wáng’s late-Qīng supplemented edition; the received text is unavoidably a late-Qīng artifact.
Translations and research
No European-language translation of the Yī-zōng jǐ-rèn biān located. For Gāo Dǒu-kuí’s place in the early-Qīng Sì-míng 四明 (Níng-bō) regional medical tradition see Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006 (Eastland, 2007).