Wàikē jīng yào 外科精要
Essentials of External Medicine by 陳自明 (撰), annotated by 薛己 (校註)
About the work
The Wàikē jīng yào 外科精要 (“Essentials of External Medicine”) is the Southern-Sòng treatise on external / surgical medicine — primarily on yōngjū 癰疽 (carbuncles, abscesses, deep-seated ulcers) — by 陳自明 Chén Zìmíng, completed in 景定 4 (1263), some twenty-six years after his more famous Fùrén dàquán liáng fāng KR3e0038. The present recension is in 3 juàn, with 薛己 Xuē Jǐ’s interpolated annotations and case records — the form in which the text is preserved as the fifth of the six earlier-authority works incorporated into the Xuēshì yīàn KR3e0070. Chén’s own preface (preserved in the SKQS print) explains that the work was composed because the existing external-medicine literature — particularly the Wàikē xīnfǎ 外科心法 of 李迅 Lǐ Xùn — was too dispersed and contradictory for practical clinical use.
Abstract
Chén Zìmíng’s original 3-juàn treatise systematises the diagnosis, internal-medicine management and topical treatment of yōngjū-type lesions: aetiology and pulse-diagnosis in the upper juàn, the major prescription strategies in the middle juàn, and specific lesions-by-anatomical-site in the lower. The doctrinal innovation is his insistence that wàikē — even when the lesion appears purely cutaneous — is essentially an internal-medicine problem with surface manifestation: the lesion is the outward sign of qi-and-blood / zàngfǔ imbalance, and topical treatment without underlying internal regimen is ineffective. This is the doctrinal position later carried forward by 薛己 Xuē Jǐ in the Wàikē shū yào 外科樞要 and the Lìyáng jī yào (KR3eu007) — Xuē’s annotation of Chén here therefore connects the Southern-Sòng founding work to Xuē’s mature 16th-century practice.
The original work is securely datable to 1263 by Chén’s preface; Xuē’s annotation programme falls in the second quarter of the 16th century. The work is regularly cited in the late-Míng Wàikē zhèngzōng 外科正宗 of Chén Shígōng 陳實功 (KR3e0080 and elsewhere) and forms one of the principal pre-Míng sources of Chinese external-medicine doctrine.
Translations and research
No substantial Western translation located.
- Furth, Charlotte. 1999. A Flourishing Yin. Berkeley: University of California Press — treats both Chén Zìmíng’s principal works.
- Wáng Yáng 王陽 (ed.). 1999. Xuē Jǐ yī-xué quán-shū 薛己醫學全書. Beijing: Zhōng-yī Gǔjí — modern critical edition of the Xuē-annotated form.
- Hinrichs, T. J., and Linda L. Barnes (eds.). 2013. Chinese Medicine and Healing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press — for the Sòng external-medicine institutional context.
Links
- Parent Xuē compendium: KR3e0070.