Cūnjū jiùjí fāng 村居救急方
Emergency Formulae for Village Living by 魏祖清 Wèi Zǔqīng (Qīng-era physician, dates uncertain).
About the work
A seven-juǎn Qīng-era popular emergency-formulary, aimed at the rural household — physicians being unavailable in the countryside, the work provides home-applicable remedies for the principal emergencies a peasant household might face: internal injuries and consumption (nèishāng 內傷, xūsǔn 虛損), bleeding (tùxuè 吐血, nǜxuè 衄血), cough and dyspnoea (kěsòu 咳嗽, xiàochuǎn 哮喘), traumatic injuries and emergencies (the “Five Stranglings” wǔjué 五絕 — hanging, drowning, burning, smothering, heat-stroke — with detailed first-aid protocols), poisoning, bites and stings, childbirth complications, and famine survival.
The work’s signature is its compilation of folk-remedy-grade ingredients alongside conventional materia medica: bath-water (yùchí shuǐ 浴池水), child’s urine (tóngbiàn 童便), pigeon-droppings (gēfèn 鴿糞), egg-yolks soaked in urine, pig-stomach packs, white-cockerel blood, hearth-ashes, lime, the “Six-Word True Words” labour-induction formula (tuò 唾 / rěntòng 忍痛 / màn línpén 慢臨盆 — “spit, endure pain, take labour slowly”), and the famine-formula of three-times-steamed three-times-dried roasted soybeans-and-sesame for a single dumpling-sized pill that “may avert hunger.” The Jiǔjué (Five Stranglings) section gives one of the most detailed first-aid protocols in the Chinese folk-medical literature, including the famous self-cut-throat (zìwěn 自刎) resuscitation method using live-chicken-skin tracheal-bandages.
The seven juǎn cover (i) nèishāng and consumption; (ii) various internal-medicine categories; (iii–vi) miscellaneous; (vii) the Wǔjué jiùjí fǎ 五絕救急法 and reproductive emergencies.
Prefaces
The hxwd _000.txt does not preserve a self-preface or external preface; the available transcription enters directly into the content of juǎn 1. A brief editorial note at the end of juǎn 7 by Qiú Jíshēng 裘吉生 (signed Jíshēng fùzhì 吉生附志) explains the editorial history of the Sānsān yīshū 三三醫書 (1923–1925) republication: the original print had multiple lacunae in the formula-collections, which the editor Cáo Bǐngzhāng 曹炳章 (1877–1956 — the major Republican-era Zhōngguó yīxué dàcídiǎn 中國醫學大辭典 lexicographer) supplemented from other formularies, and the Bìnán quányīng fǎ 避難全嬰法 (a refugee-protection technique for keeping infants from crying — using a stuffed cloth ball of licorice or sweet powder placed in the infant’s mouth — explicitly noted as having saved many lives during the Tàipíng refugee disorders) was obtained by Qiú himself from a Fāngbiàn yīshū 方便醫書.
Abstract
The work is undated in the surviving recension; internal evidence (the inclusion of the Bìnán quányīng fǎ refugee-protection technique with explicit reference to the Tàipíng-era refugee disorders) suggests a composition window from the late Qiánlóng era (1700s) through the mid-Tóng-zhì era (1860s). The 1700–1850 bracket adopted here is the conservative range.
Wèi Zǔqīng is poorly documented in standard biographical sources. The hxwd recension descends from the Sānsān yīshū edition of c. 1925 (with the Cáo Bǐngzhāng supplements and Qiú Jíshēng’s editorial note). The work was a typical xiāngjū jiùjí 鄉居救急 (rural emergency) handbook of the Qīng tradition, of which dozens of similar compilations circulated; this one survived through the Sānsān yīshū reprint.
Not in CBDB.
Translations and research
No European-language translation of the Cūn-jū jiù-jí fāng located. For the rural-emergency-handbook genre see Angela Ki Che Leung, “Medical Instruction and Popularization in Ming-Qing China,” Late Imperial China 24.1 (2003), and Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women (California, 2010), for the childbirth-emergency literature. The Cáo Bǐng-zhāng / Qiú Jí-shēng Sān-sān yī-shū editorial method is documented in Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine (UBC, 2014).
Other points of interest
The work’s Wǔjué jiùjí 五絕救急 section is a remarkable folk-medical first-aid protocol — particularly the techniques for resuscitating drowned, hanged, and self-cut-throat victims. The Bìnán quányīng fǎ (refugee-infant-protection technique) is a poignant document of mid-19th-c. peasant-survival practice.