Yībìng jiǎnyào 醫病簡要
A Concise Essential Guide to Treating Illness by 張畹 Zhāng Wǎn (mid- to late-19th-c. physician of Shàoxìng, Zhèjiāng).
About the work
A clinical handbook with appended medical cases (yīàn 醫案 in two juǎn) by the Shàoxìng physician Zhāng Wǎn, surviving in manuscript form via his grandson and published in 1913 with a preface by Bāo Yuèhú 包越瑚. The work was composed over Zhāng’s clinical career — internal references date individual cases between Dàoguāng jǐyǒu 道光己酉 / 1849 and the Tóngzhì late period (c. 1880) — with the author’s reflections drawing on cases observed during the Tàipíng tribulation in the Shàoxìng region (he writes from rural refuge during the disorder of Tóngzhì rénxū 同治壬戌 / 1862). The compositional window adopted here is 1860–1880, the second half of Zhāng’s clinical career.
The work is organised by clinical-pattern category:
- Shétāi 舌苔 (tongue-diagnosis): substantial extensions of Zhāng’s Yītōng 醫通 (Zhāng Lù) tongue-method into the regional wēnbìng patterns.
- Shānghán 傷寒: a synthesis of Zhāng Zhòngjǐng / Kē Yùnbó (Kē Qín 柯琴) / Yǔ Língtāi (Yú Chāng) on the Shānghán lùn.
- Wēnxié 溫邪 (warm-pathogen disorders): Yè Tiānshì’s Wēnrè lùn methodology, extended with cases observed during the Dàoguāng jǐyǒu and gēngxū (1849–1850) epidemic seasons (which produced extreme mortality in the Shàoxìng region — Zhāng provides one of the few extant clinical records of this).
- Fēngwēn 風溫: Yè-school xīnliáng jiějī 辛涼解肌 protocols, with cases.
- Rè rù xuèshì 熱入血室: handling of warm-pathogen disease in menstruating and pregnant women, with detailed cases including the locally-famous case of a virgin daughter who concealed her menarche.
- Lìjí 痢疾 (dysentery): an unusually systematic differential between gānlì 肝痢 and pílì 脾痢, with detailed case-records and a separate sub-section on xiūxī lì 休息痢 (recurrent-remitting dysentery) — Zhāng’s clinical signature was to schedule treatment of xiūxī lì in chūnfēn (vernal equinox).
- Nüèjí 瘧疾 (malaria), fúshǔ 伏暑 (latent summerheat) and other seasonal-fever categories.
- Cù 瘄 (= Sūzhōu shā 痧, the warm-disease childhood eruption / measles-like complaint): treated according to season — dōngwēn in winter, shǔfēng in summer, qiūzào in autumn, fēngwēn in spring; the standard regional folk-formula Xīhú liǔ 西湖柳 (Hangzhou willow) is explicitly rejected as dangerous on Wú Jūtōng’s authority.
The case-records are an unusually rich late-Qīng Shàoxìng clinical resource: they document regional drug-tolerance differences across Chinese populations (Shànxī people tolerate aconite and bādòu well; Hénán people can take massive dàhuáng but not huánglián; Sūzhōu people use jīnzhī 金汁 in place of dàhuáng), and they preserve detailed encounters with named local figures (the jīnfǔ 錦府 magistrate Gěng’s brother, the Wú Yòuxuān of Jiāxīng prefectural staff, the Zhū Yǒngquán family, the Shàoxìng gānjí 幹吏 Chén Bùyún).
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt carries a single preface by Bāo Yuèhú 包越瑚, dated Mínguó èr nián là yuè 民國貳年臘月 = ROC 2 / 1913 twelfth month, written at age 56 suì. Bāo narrates: Zhāng was a literatus who turned to medicine, “fond of medical study from his school-days, widely read in the medical literature, who in middle age would treat illness with immediate success”; Bāo had been a patient of Zhāng’s in childhood and recalled the white-haired, child-faced master then near seventy suì; Zhāng’s son Shān xiānshēng 山先生 had continued the practice (without his father’s wider fame); Zhāng’s grandson JīngQǐ 睛豈 had returned in autumn from Hénán with the grandfather’s manuscript clinical-handbook and two juǎn of medical cases, asking Bāo to write a preface to a planned publication.
Abstract
The 1913 publication was the editio princeps but apparently as a private (perhaps Shàoxìng) imprint — the publication did not lead to wider Republican-period circulation. The hxwd recension descends from a Japanese reprint.
Zhāng Wǎn is poorly documented in standard biographical sources. Internal evidence places him in Shàoxìng city (the Xǐmǎchí 洗馬池 neighbourhood) and active from the 1840s into the 1880s, with his reputation primarily local. The catalog provides no author, so this attribution rests on the 1913 preface.
The work is one of the more substantial late-Qīng Shàoxìng (eastern Zhèjiāng) regional medical-case-record corpora, alongside Wáng Méngyīng’s better-known Hángzhōu-side work.
Translations and research
No European-language translation or substantial secondary study of the Yī-bìng jiǎn-yào located. For late-Qīng Shào-xìng medicine see Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine (UBC, 2014), and Marta Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics (Routledge, 2011).
Other points of interest
The case-records contain valuable ethnographic detail on late-Qīng regional drug-tolerance differences and on the clinical practice of the eastern-Zhè coastal communities, who Zhāng records as having a folk-medical tradition of not using drugs for severe illness (yánhǎi rén jīngbìng zé bùfú yào 沿海人經病則不服藥) — a striking documentary record of late-Imperial medical pluralism within a single region.