Zhōngguó yīxué yuánliú lùn 中國醫學源流論
On the Origins and Development of Chinese Medicine by 謝觀 (撰)
About the work
The Zhōngguó yīxué yuánliú lùn is the Republican-era historian’s manifesto of 謝觀 Xiè Guān 謝觀 (zì Lìhéng 利恆, 1880–1950), the founding principal of the Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and chief author of the Zhōngguó yīxué dà cídiǎn 中國醫學大辭典 (1921). Drafted in the mid-1920s as a sequel to the Dà cídiǎn, the Yuánliú lùn surveys the four-thousand-year arc of Chinese medical learning “from Yán Huáng down to the present,” tracing the source streams (源) of each tradition and the branches (流) into which they divided. The work is organised as a series of thematic essays opening with a Yīxué dàgāng 醫學大綱 (“General Outline of Medical Learning”) that proposes a periodisation — Xīzhōu through Hàn as the period of origin, WèiJìn through Táng as the period of repair-of-fragments, Sòng through Míng as the period of new schools, and the Qīng-onward as the period of synthesis — and continues through chapters on doctrinal lineages (Yīxué biànqiān 醫學變遷), the canonical works (Nèijīng, Nànjīng, Shānghán, běncǎo), the JīnYuán sì dàjiā 金元四大家 of 劉完素 Liú Wánsù, 張從正 Zhāng Cóngzhèng, 李杲 Lǐ Gǎo, and 朱震亨 Zhū Zhènhēng, the Wēnbǔ line of 薛己 Xuē Jǐ and 張介賓 Zhāng Jièbīn, the Wēnbìng 溫病 school, formulary medicine, zhēnjiǔ 鍼灸, gynaecology, pediatrics, and external medicine. It closes with reflections on the modernist controversies of Xiè’s own day — the 1929 anti-abolition campaign, the League of Nations health official’s 1930 visit to inspect Chinese medicine, and the futility of “unified-formulary” reform — turning the historical survey into a polemic for the cultural autonomy of zhōngyī 中醫 against medical universalism.
Abstract
The catalog meta gives the author as 謝觀 and the dynasty as 民國, both correct. The Kanripo edition derives from the hxwd / Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn (海外回歸中醫善本) reprint of the 1935 Shanghai edition. The work’s transmission is straightforward but worth noting in detail: the manuscript was substantially complete by the mid-1920s — Qín Bówèi’s 1935 preface states explicitly that “ten years have passed since the manuscript was finished” (脫稿業經十載) — and circulated in serialised installments in the journals Guóyī gōngbào 國醫公報 and Yījiè chūnqiū 醫界春秋 in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The first integral printing was in 1935, when Xiè’s “students of the gate” 及門諸子 (chief among them 秦伯未 Qín Bówèi and 張贊臣 Zhāng Zànchén) compiled the Xièshì quánshū 謝氏全集 / Xiè Lìhéng yīxué cóngshū 謝利恆醫學叢書 and placed the Yuánliú lùn as the volume opening the collection. The composition window 1924–1925 used here brackets the “ten years before 1935” figure given in Qín’s preface.
The Yuánliú lùn has a special place in the historiography of Chinese medicine because it was written from the inside of the institutional struggle for the survival of zhōngyī. Xiè himself led the November 1929 mass protest in Shanghai and the Nanjing delegation that secured the rescinding of the Fèizhǐ jiùyī àn 廢止舊醫案 of February 1929. The text records (in autobiographical asides at the close) his exchange with the League of Nations health-section head Frederick (費而伯 Fèi’érbó), who visited China in 1930 to inspect Western-medical institutions and was taken by Xiè to visit the Chinese-medical colleges; Frederick’s argument that “physiology is universal, so therapy must be universal” Xiè counters with the rhetorical question “if physiology is universal, why does European medicine itself divide into English, French, German, and Swiss schools?” The work also records Xiè’s 1931 refusal of a Changzhou proposal to “standardise local prescription registers against ancient formulae” — on the ground that local pharmacopoeia, calibrated over centuries to local water, soil, and climate, encode therapeutic optimisation that the gǔfāng canon cannot reproduce.
In substantive content the Yuánliú lùn is the single best Chinese-language pre-1949 narrative survey of the development of Chinese medicine. Volker Scheid (2007) calls it “the foundational Republican-era history of Chinese medicine, written from inside the Mènghé current.”
Translations and research
- Yú Yǒngyán 余永燕 (ed.), Zhōngguó yīxué yuánliú lùn 中國醫學源流論, Fúzhōu: Fújiàn kējì chūbǎnshè, 2003 — modern punctuated critical edition with biographical apparatus.
- Xiè Lìhéng yīxué quánshū 謝利恆醫學全書, Beijing: Zhōngguó zhōngyīyào chūbǎnshè, 2015 — collected works.
- Volker Scheid, Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine 1626–2006, Seattle: Eastland Press, 2007 — the standard English-language history of the Mènghé current, with extensive treatment of Xiè Guān’s role in Republican TCM and a close reading of the Yuánliú lùn.
- Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960, UBC Press, 2014 — places the 1929 controversy and Xiè’s role in its broader institutional context.
- Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey Nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014 — extensive discussion of the Fèizhǐ jiùyī àn episode in which Xiè was the leading actor.
- No complete European-language translation exists; chapters are excerpted in Hinrichs & Barnes (eds.), Chinese Medicine and Healing (Harvard 2013).
Other points of interest
The Yuánliú lùn is the prose pendant to Xiè Guān’s eight-year labour on the Zhōngguó yīxué dà cídiǎn 中國醫學大辭典 (1921), and the two should be read together as a single Republican-Mènghé scholarly project of medical-historical self-definition: the Dà cídiǎn providing the bibliographic-lexical apparatus, the Yuánliú lùn providing the historical narrative that organises it. The fact that Xiè’s chief disciples were the same group (秦伯未, 張贊臣) who shortly thereafter assumed leadership of Shanghai TCM institutions means that the Yuánliú lùn’s periodisation of Chinese medical history is, effectively, the framework through which mid-twentieth-century mainland Chinese medical historiography first organised itself.