Gù Sōngyuán yī jìng 顧松園醫鏡
Master Gù Sōng-yuán’s Mirror of Medicine by 顧靖遠 Gù Jìngyuǎn (hào Sōngyuán 松園, fl. late 17th – early 18th c., Kāngxī 康熙 era).
About the work
A sixteen-juǎn early-Qīng (early Kāngxī) clinical compendium — the product of Gù Sōngyuán’s reported “thirty-plus years of probing and testing” (竭三十餘年探索之功). The work is structured as a systematic clinical reference covering internal medicine, women’s medicine, paediatrics, and shānghán, with each section organised in the established late-Míng / early-Qīng zhèngzhì 證治 (pattern-and-treatment) format: pathomechanism → standard prescription → clinical jiājiǎn 加減 (modifications). Gù’s clinical positioning is essentially that of a late-Wēnbǔ synthesist working in the Jǐngyuè tradition, with attention to the emerging wēnbìng doctrine of his contemporaries.
The author’s family circumstances supply an unusually clear authorial frame. Gù was a hereditary scholar-physician who had successfully passed the shēngyuán level twice (兩預棘闈) before turning to medicine after a serious personal illness; he served briefly at the Tàiyī yuàn 太醫院 in Běijīng during his medical career and consulted the imperial-court archives in producing the work.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries a substantial postface (bá 跋) by Gù Sōngyuán’s adopted son Gù Yuánzǎi 顧元宰 — biological son of Gù Sōngyuán’s middle brother Xīhóu gōng 西侯公, taken into Gù Sōngyuán’s family at age ten when Gù Sōngyuán was without natural heirs. Yuánzǎi narrates: (i) the long compositional history of the work, refined through “three or four rounds of selection-and-deletion” (再四刪削) over thirty-plus years; (ii) the adoption and Yuánzǎi’s childhood education under Gù Sōngyuán; (iii) Gù Sōngyuán’s brief Běijīng career as imperial physician and his consultation of the Tàiyīyuàn medical archive; (iv) the publication of the manuscript by Yuánzǎi at Kāngxī 58 / 1719, làyuè 臘月 (twelfth month), first day — the date that securely fixes the editio princeps.
Abstract
Gù Sōngyuán (Gù Jìngyuǎn) was a Kāng-xī-era physician of Jiāngsū / Zhèjiāng (precise locality not certain); his lifedates are not securely documented but the early-Kāng-xī floruit fits his Tàiyīyuàn service and the 1719 publication of his work, which was completed before his death by his son. The 1719 (Kāngxī 58) postface gives us the secure dating; the work is conventionally bracketed c. 1685 – c. 1719 in composition. Gù is not in CBDB.
The hxwd recension descends from a Japanese reprinting of the 1719 editio princeps.
Translations and research
No European-language secondary literature located. For the late-Wēn-bǔ / wēn-bìng transition during the Kāng-xī era see Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics (Routledge, 2011); Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition (Eastland, 2007).