Yīshì qǐyuán 醫事啟源
Origins of Medical Practice by 今邨亮 (撰)
About the work
The Iji keigen / Yīshì qǐyuán 醫事啟源 is a one-juan, twenty-essay treatise composed in Bunkyū 元年 = 1861 by the late-Edo kanpō 漢方 physician 今邨亮 Imamura Ryōan 今村了庵 (1814–1890; the catalog meta’s “今樹亮” is a slip for 今邨亮 / 今村亮, the surname 邨 being interchangeable with 村), at the very moment when the bakufu was elevating the Itō Genboku 伊東玄朴 vaccination clinic into the official Seiyō Igakusho 西洋醫學所 (the precursor of the Tokyo University medical faculty). The work is a polemical exercise in Chinese medical-historical philology: Imamura argues, essay by essay, that every supposedly novel technique of European medicine — anatomical dissection, urinary catheterisation, blister therapy with bānmáo 斑蝥 (Spanish-fly), leech blood-letting, smallpox inoculation, and so on — has classical Chinese antecedents in the Sùwèn, the Língshū, the Qiānjīn fāng, and the JìnTáng formulary literature. The aim, stated explicitly in 淺田惟常 Asada Sōhaku’s bá 跋, is “to bridle the tongues of those who pipe in foreign idiom and to disabuse the credulous of their delusion” — a manifesto of late-bakumatsu kanpō self-defence against rangaku triumphalism.
Abstract
The catalog meta gives the author as “日本 · 今樹亮”; 樹 is a typographical slip for 邨 — the proper name is 今邨亮 Imamura Ryō (hào Ryōan 了庵, zì Yúfǔ 與甫 / Jǐqīng 祗卿), 1814–1890, the late-Edo / early-Meiji shogunal oku-i 奧醫師 and kanpō philological scholar. The dynasty is properly 江戶 (late Tokugawa). The Kanripo edition derives from the hxwd / Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn (海外回歸中醫善本) collection, reproducing the Bunkyū-era engraved edition rather than the Sìkù-tradition WYG.
The composition date is fixed precisely by the work’s own xùyán 緒言 (compiled by the publisher in 1862): “the book must have been composed in Bunkyū yuánnián [1861], the year in which the Seiyō Igakusho was established.” Three paratexts accompany the work in the present recension: (i) a preface by Wakayama Jō 若山拯 of Iwa-mura 岩邑, dated Bunkyū 2 第一月 jiǎzǐ (= 1862 spring); (ii) a colophon (bá 跋一) by 淺田惟常 Asada Sōhaku 淺田惟常 (hào Ritsuen 慄園, 1815–1894) — the same Asada whose own Kōkoku meii den 皇國名醫傳 (KR3es006) was being produced in the same medical circle at the same time — with the impressed seal “Jíyī Wéicháng yìnzhāng” 疾醫惟常印章; and (iii) a colophon (bá 跋二) by Imamura’s son Imamura Hō 今村芳, who supervised the printing.
The twenty essays organize the polemic by topic. The xùyán describes the work’s strategy as identifying, in turn, each Western surgical or pharmacological technique and tracing it to a Chinese textual locus: e.g. anatomy to the Sùwèn and Língshū’s Jīngmài discussion; catheterisation 導尿 (introduction of a tube into the bladder) to the KR3e0005 Qiānjīn fāng of Sūn Sīmiǎo; bānmáo qǐpào 斑蝥起泡 (cantharide vesication) and mǎqí zāxuè 螞蜞咂血 (leech blood-letting) to JìnTáng formulary literature; and inoculation to native Chinese variolation practice. The closing essay defends the gǔfāng 古方 stance against vaccination on the doctrinal ground that “human force cannot prevail over the celestial order” (天定勝人之理), citing the example of patients in Western-Higo 西肥 (Gotō islands) who developed severe pediatric ailments after smallpox inoculation. Imamura’s son’s colophon notes that not all of his father’s children proved immune to either variolation or vaccination, citing his own father’s adult smallpox infection.
The work is one of the densest documentary samples of late-bakumatsu kanpō intellectual culture and its self-positioning vis-à-vis rangaku. Its rhetorical strategy — assimilating European technique to native classical antecedents — is identical in form to the Sino-Japanese mid-Meiji arguments mounted twenty years later in defence of the kanpō tradition against state abolition.
Translations and research
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠, “Bakumatsu-ki kanpō no jikō ninshiki — Imamura Ryōan Iji keigen o megutte” 幕末期漢方の自己認識 — 今村了庵『醫事啓源』をめぐって, Nihon ishigaku zasshi 日本醫史學雜誌 — and related contributions by Mayanagi reconstructing the late-Edo kanpō-rangaku polemics.
- Hattori Toshirō 服部敏良, Edo jidai igaku-shi no kenkyū 江戸時代醫學史の研究, Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1978 — sections on the late-Tokugawa kanpō response to Western medicine.
- Susan L. Burns, Kingdom of the Sick: A History of Leprosy and Japan, Hawai’i 2019, and her earlier work on Edo medical thought — contextualises the kanpō vs. rangaku controversy in which this work intervenes.
- Kō chū Iji keigen 攷註醫事啟源 — annotated re-edition of Imamura’s text, posthumous and circulating within Imamura’s own pedagogical lineage.
- No European-language translation is known.
Other points of interest
Note that this Yīshì qǐyuán (1861) is not to be confused with the much earlier and very differently-spelled Yīxué qǐyuán 醫學啟源 (KR3es001, c. 1186) of 張元素 Zhāng Yuánsù — the resonance in title is doxographically loaded: Imamura is implicitly claiming the qǐyuán “tracing-to-origin” mantle for his project of relocating Western medicine within the Chinese classical tradition, a deliberate echo of the Yìshuǐ-school founder’s title.
The work is also notable as documentary evidence for the close intellectual collaboration between Imamura Ryōan and 淺田惟常 Asada Sōhaku — the two most influential bakumatsu / early-Meiji kanpō physicians, both subsequently retained as imperial physicians after the 1868 Restoration.