Yīxué rùmén 醫學入門
A Gateway to Medical Learning by 李梃 Lǐ Tǐng (zì Jiànzhāi 健齋, fl. mid-Wàn-lì 萬曆, Nánfēng 南豐 / Jiāngxī).
About the work
An eight-juǎn mid-Wàn-lì comprehensive medical curriculum compendium — one of the principal late-Míng pedagogical handbooks, structured around a deliberate Inner Collection (內集) / Outer Collection (外集) division: the Inner Collection covers the foundational doctrinal-anatomical topics (cosmological yùnqì 運氣, jīngluò 經絡 channel-network, acupuncture, pulse-diagnosis, and materia medica); the Outer Collection covers the clinical-applied topics (cold-damage, internal damage, miscellaneous diseases, women’s medicine, paediatrics, smallpox-and-measles, surgery). Lǐ Tǐng’s editorial method, set out in the opening Jílì 集例 (editorial protocol), is to take the existing pedagogical-handbook tradition — Wáng Shūhé 王叔和’s Màijué, Lǐ Dōngyuán’s pharmacology, Liú Chún’s Yījīng xiǎoxué (KR3er051), and the Tàipíng huìmín héjì jú fāng 太平惠民和劑局方 — and to combine, abridge, and harmonise them into a single internally-consistent curriculum, with explicit cross-attribution of every borrowed passage.
The work is structured for sequential pedagogical reading: each topic is laid out in headed gē 歌 (verse mnemonics) followed by Lǐ Tǐng’s interlinear prose commentary, with each prescription identified by source and explicit clinical-modification protocol. It is one of the most widely transmitted Míng medical handbooks and became a standard curriculum text in Chosŏn Korea (where it was the principal Chinese-medicine reference for the Korean Dōngyī 東醫 tradition through the Dōngyī bǎojiàn 東醫寶鑑 of Hǔ Jùn 許浚).
Prefaces
The hxwd _001.txt opens with the Jílì 集例 (editorial protocol, ~30 items) explaining Lǐ Tǐng’s pedagogical method, source-selection, and the rationale for the Inner/Outer Collection division. The full text accessible elsewhere preserves Lǐ Tǐng’s zìxù 自序 dated Wànlì 3 / 1575, in which Lǐ narrates that he had been forced into medicine by his own illness in young adulthood and had subsequently compiled the work from his decade-plus of reading; the prefaces of Lǐ’s collaborators and patrons follow in the standard recension.
Abstract
Lǐ Tǐng was a Nánfēng 南豐 (Jiāngxī) physician of the mid-Wàn-lì era, otherwise poorly attested in the standard Míng bibliographic catalogues but securely identifiable through CBDB (id 277911). His own self-preface to the work places it at Wànlì 3 / 1575, which we follow.
The work was reprinted continuously through the late Míng and Qīng, and was a standard medical-textbook in late-Imperial China. Its impact on the Chosŏn Korean medical tradition is particularly notable: the Dōngyī bǎojiàn (1613) cites Lǐ Tǐng more than 1,500 times and replicates his Inner/Outer Collection structure in its own organisational scheme. The hxwd recension descends from a Japanese (Edo-period) reprinting.
Translations and research
No European-language translation of the Yī-xué rù-mén located. The work is centrally treated in TJ Hinrichs and Linda Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing (Harvard, 2013), ch. 8; Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics (Routledge, 2011); for the Korean reception see Don Baker, “Oriental Medicine in Korea”, in Medicine across Cultures (Springer, 2003).