Jiàozhù Fùrén liáng fāng 校註婦人良方
Annotated Good-Prescriptions for Women by 陳自明 (原撰) — annotated and revised by 薛己 (校註)
About the work
The Jiàozhù Fùrén liáng fāng 校註婦人良方 is 薛己 Xuē Jǐ’s collated and annotated edition of 陳自明 Chén Zìmíng’s foundational Southern-Sòng work on women’s medicine — the Fùrén dàquán liáng fāng 婦人大全良方 (24 juàn, completed Jiāxī 1 = 1237; for the original see KR3e0038). The Sìkù tíyào of KR3e0070 explicitly lists it as one of the six earlier-authority works that Xuē included in his Xuēshì yīàn in his own collated form. The text retains Chén’s eight categorical gates — tiáojīng 調經 (regulating menstruation), miscellaneous diseases, qiúsì 求嗣 (seeking offspring), prenatal education, pregnancy, the lying-in month, difficult births, and post-natal care — but with Xuē’s interpolated case-records (醫案) and clinical commentary appended throughout, drawing the work into the Bāwèi / Liùwèi warming-tonifying frame of his own practice.
Abstract
Composition of Xuē’s annotation belongs to the second quarter of the 16th century (c. 1529–1547), the period of his major collations of earlier authorities. The work fixes the standard transmitted form of Chén Zìmíng’s text from the Míng onwards: practitioners read the Fùrén liáng fāng through Xuē’s commentary, and the original Sòng text-without-Xuē circulated only as an editorial reconstruction in modern times. The annotation programme is doctrinally substantive: where Chén’s Sòng text follows the contemporary cooling / blood-moving prescription strategy for menstrual and post-partum conditions, Xuē repeatedly recommends warming-tonifying interventions targeting Mìngmén deficiency, and his case-records illustrate complex deficiency presentations that the simpler Sòng prescriptions did not address.
For the original work see KR3e0038. For the parent collected corpus see KR3e0070. The present hxwd reprint follows the standard Míng / Qīng Xuē-revised line.
Translations and research
- Furth, Charlotte. 1999. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Berkeley: University of California Press — extensive treatment of both Chén Zìmíng’s original and Xuē’s revision.
- Wilms, Sabine, tr. 2005. Bèi-jí qiān-jīn yào fāng — Volume 2–4 on women’s medicine (translates Sūn Sīmiǎo’s parallel Táng material; useful for comparison).
- Wáng Yáng 王陽 (ed.). 1999. Xuē Jǐ yī-xué quán-shū 薛己醫學全書. Beijing: Zhōng-yī Gǔjí.