Huángguó míngyī zhuàn 皇國名醫傳
Biographies of the Famous Physicians of the Imperial Realm (Japanese Kōkoku meii den) by 淺田惟常 (撰)
About the work
The Kōkoku meii den / Huángguó míngyī zhuàn is the principal late-Edo prosopographical history of Japanese medicine, composed in literary Chinese (hanbun) by 淺田惟常 Asada Sōhaku 浅田宗伯 (imina Korehisa 惟常, hào Ritsuen 慄園, 1815–1894), the foremost kanpō physician of the bakumatsu and Meiji periods. The qiánbiān 前編 in three juan, completed and prefaced Kāei 4 = 1851 and printed shortly thereafter by Takamiya Jinzaemon 高美屋甚左衛門, surveys Japanese physicians from mythological antiquity (the immortals Ōnamuji-no-mikoto 大己貴命 and Sukunabikona-no-mikoto 少彦名命) through the Imperial-era opening of medical contact with the continent (the Silla physician Kim Mu 金武 dispatched to Emperor Ingyō in 414, the Paekche physician Toku-rai 德來 in the reign of Yūryaku, the Sōrai physicians Wakusa-no-omi 和藥使主 and others, the Inaba and Tanba lineages of the Heian medical bureaucracy), and onward through the Heian-Kamakura sōi 僧醫 (monk-physicians) and the gukoku 古國 hereditary medical houses down to the Edo-period gohō 古方 / gosei 後世 / kōshō 考証 schools that culminate in the Tamba / Taki philological circle of the Igaku-kan. The text is organised as a chain of short biographical notices in the style of the Hou Hàn shū lièzhuàn — each subject named, native-place, master-lineage, court appointments, and signature clinical case in two to ten lines — and is the single most exhaustive premodern catalogue of Japanese physicians ever compiled. The present Kanripo edition bundles the qiánbiān three juan together with the appendix 杏林雜話 Kyōrin zawa 杏林雜話 (composed 1865, prefaced 1865 by Kaiho Genbi Shun-nō 海保元備春農 and 1872 by Ōkei Rin Kō 鶯溪林晄), which gathers the anecdotal and supplementary material that could not be fitted into the formal biographical structure of the main work.
Abstract
The catalog meta gives the author as “日本 · 淺田惟常” and leaves the dynasty unspecified; the proper dynasty designation is 江戶 (late Tokugawa, with the appended Kyōrin zawa prefaces extending into early Meiji). The Kanripo edition derives from the hxwd / Hǎiwài huíguī Zhōngyī shànběn 海外回歸中醫善本 reprint of Asada’s bakumatsu engraved edition. Asada’s imina 惟常 (Korehisa) is the form preferred by the catalog and adopted as the canonical Kanji-name for the person note (淺田惟常); his much better-known gō Sōhaku 宗伯 is used in modern Japanese scholarship and on the Asadaame lozenge brand that perpetuates his name commercially.
The composition history is as follows. The three-juan qiánbiān was substantially complete by 1850 and bears a Kāei 4 = 1851 preface; it appeared in a Takamiya Jinzaemon engraved edition shortly thereafter. Asada continued to gather material that could not be fitted into the formal biographical scheme of the main work — anecdotes, jīnjiè 警誡 lessons, philological aperçus, single-line characterisations — and these were gathered as the Kyōrin zawa 杏林雜話, whose Keiō 1 = 1865 preface by Kaiho Genbi Shun-nō (a doctor of Asada’s circle) is dated “summer of Keiō yǐchǒu at the south studio of Kòupénshè”; a second preface by Ōkei Rin Kō (also a friend of Asada) is dated Meiji rénshēn = 1872 fourth month. The work was thus produced over a fifteen-year span, 1850–1865, during the period when Asada was rising from provincial Shinano physician to the foremost shogunal kanpō practitioner. The bracket notBefore 1850 / notAfter 1865 reflects this composition span; the present edition’s printing follows.
The qiánbiān is structured: juan-上 covers earliest physicians of the Sōrai 藥師 tradition and the imperial Tenyaku ryō 典藥寮 down through the Nara period; juan-中 covers the Heian-period Wage 和氣氏 and Tamba 丹波 hereditary medical houses (this is the locus classicus for the genealogy of the 丹波康賴 Ishinpō 醫心方 author); juan-下 covers the Heian-Kamakura sōi 僧醫 (monk-physicians) and gives lemmata for Hōren 法蓮, Hōei 法榮, Nyūdō Jijū 入道侍從, Sekiya 石屋, and other clerical figures. The Kyōrin zawa by contrast is anecdotal: it opens with a survey of the early-Edo SūwènNànjīng 素問難經 teaching tradition of Aiba Tōan 饗庭東庵 and his pupil Mioka Sanpaku 味岡三伯, traces the polemic between jiǎngshòu 講授-school physicians (Mioka’s line: Ihara Dōestsu 井原道閱, Asai Shūhaku 淺井周璞, Ogawa Sakuan 小川朔庵, Okamoto Ippōshi 岡本一抱子) and the clinical-philological gōfāng 古方 school (Gobayashi Genyi 古林見宜, Nakayama Sanryū 中山三柳, Kitayama Juan 北山壽安, Nagoya Gen’i 名古屋玄醫, Kazuki Gyūzan 香月牛山), and continues through anecdote and case after anecdote. The Kyōrin zawa prefaces explicitly defend Asada’s choice to write in hanbun on the principle that “all learning derives from the Chinese land” 學術皆原乎漢土 — a position which by 1865 was a polemical defence of kanpō against rangaku.
The work is one of the principal documentary sources for the history of Japanese medicine before the modern philological surveys of Fujikawa Yū 富士川游 (Nihon igaku-shi 日本醫學史, 1904) and Hattori Toshirō 服部敏良. Modern Japanese medical-historical scholarship from the early twentieth century onward treats Asada’s Kōkoku meii den as the canonical pre-modern Japanese medical-biographical compendium, and Fujikawa’s 1904 history is built explicitly on the documentary foundation Asada laid.
Translations and research
- Asada Sōhaku, Kōkoku meii den (前編 3 juan + Kyōrin zawa 2 juan), in Kinsei kanpō igakusho shūsei 近世漢方醫學書集成 vol. 99 (Asada Sōhaku 5), ed. Ōtsuka Yasuo 大塚恭男 et al., Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 1979–1984 — standard modern reprint with bibliographic apparatus.
- Mayanagi Makoto 真柳誠, “Asada Sōhaku no chojutsu to sono shozai” 浅田宗伯の著述とその所在 (online bibliography, square.umin.ac.jp/mayanagi/) — the standard catalog of Asada’s 80+ titles.
- Fujikawa Yū 富士川游, Nihon igaku-shi 日本醫學史 (1904, revised 1941; English trans. by John Ruhräh, Japanese Medicine, Hoeber, 1934) — the canonical history of Japanese medicine, built on the documentary base of Asada’s Kōkoku meii den.
- 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.
- Margaret Lock, East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience, Berkeley 1980 — context on Asada’s lineage in modern kanpō.
- No European-language translation of Kōkoku meii den exists.
Other points of interest
The Kōkoku meii den is the prosopographical pendant to 丹波元胤 Taki Motoin’s Yījí kǎo (KR3es003): where the Taki produced an exhaustive bibliography of Chinese medical texts, Asada produced an exhaustive prosopography of Japanese medical persons — together the two bakumatsu Edo-philological projects defined the documentary foundation on which all subsequent histories of East Asian medicine were built. The two authors knew each other’s circle: Asada wrote the bá colophon to Imamura Ryōan’s KR3es004 Iji keigen (1862), and the Kyōrin zawa draws extensively on Tamba-family materials.
Note also that the work was reprinted in twentieth-century Republican China specifically because it served as a documentary source for the early Republican project of self-defining “national medicine” 國醫 — Xiè Guān’s KR3es005 Zhōngguó yīxué yuánliú lùn circle had read this text, and the Hǎiwài huíguī (hxwd) collection of which the present edition is part was assembled precisely to bring such Edo-philological materials, long preserved in Japanese libraries but lost in China, back into circulation in modern Chinese medical historiography.