Wēnbìng zhī yánjiū 溫病之研究
A Study of Warm-Disease by 源元凱 (撰)
About the work
The Wēnbìng zhī yánjiū 溫病之研究 (Japanese Onpyō no kenkyū), 2 juàn, is a late-Edo Japanese kanpō 漢方 monograph on the treatment of warm-disease (wēnbìng 溫病) epidemics by the Kyoto physician 源元凱 Minamoto Genkai 源元凱. The work was conceived during and after the Tenmei 8 = 1788 Kyoto epidemic — which followed the catastrophic Tenmei fire of the same year — and was completed shortly before the author’s death; his son Tokuyō 德輿 added a preface dated Bunka 辛未 = 1811 and oversaw the printing. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3eg025 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The book’s controlling problem is set out in Tokuyō’s 1811 preface: in the 1788 Kyoto epidemic, conventional wēnyì 溫疫 treatment following 吳有性 Wú Yǒuxìng’s Wēnyì lùn 溫疫論 (1642) failed in the large class of cases that presented as “deficiency-below, excess-above” (下虛上盈) — i.e. shading rapidly into shàoyīn 少陰 syndrome. Working from the Lǐngnán wèishēng fāng 嶺南衛生方, Minamoto found that fùzǐ 附子 (aconite) prescriptions could pull such patients back from collapse, and reorganised this clinical experience into the present systematic exposition.
Doctrinally, Minamoto distinguishes two grades of pestilential pathogen — a “rigid pathogen” (剛邪 gō-ja) and a “soft pathogen” (柔邪 jū-ja) — both lodging initially in the móyuán 膜原 (the membrane-source) of Wú Yǒuxìng’s pathogen-localisation theory. The rigid pathogen follows Wú’s transmission pattern to yángmíng 陽明 and yields to purgation by dàhuáng 大黃 (rhubarb); the soft pathogen, by contrast, is sluggish, bypasses the stomach, and descends directly to shàoyīn, producing the syndrome the 1788 epidemic exhibited and demanding fùzǐ-based warming therapy. Wú’s omission of wēnyì-with-yīn-syndromes, Minamoto contends, simply reflects what was present in Wú’s own clinical caseload at Sūzhōu in the 1640s — not a doctrinal completeness on Wú’s part. The treatise’s other distinctive recommendation, against Wú’s dàhuáng purgation in such cases, is the use of melon-stalk (guādì 瓜蒂) emesis to drive the pathogen back out through the entry-point (mouth and nose) — “out the door it came in.”
Composition is bracketed between the 1788 epidemic that occasioned the clinical observations and Tokuyō’s 1811 prefatory publication; on Tokuyō’s testimony the manuscript was completed just before Minamoto’s death. The work was transmitted to Republican China and reprinted by 湯本求真 Tāngběn Qiúzhēn in his Huáng Hàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), the immediate vector by which the hxwd-series text reaches the present catalog.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language scholarship located.
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39 (2): 299–324 — for the late-Edo kanpō context.
- Hanson, Marta. 2011. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China. London: Routledge — for the broader wēn-bìng tradition Minamoto engages.
- Otsuka Yasuo 大塚敬節, ed. 1959. Kinsei Kanpō igakusho shūsei 近世漢方醫學書集成. Tokyo: Meicho Shuppan — the standard reprint series for late-Edo medical works of this type.
Other points of interest
The work is a rare instance of a Japanese-authored wēnbìng monograph being reimported into China by the Republican-period kanpō revival; the polemic against Wú Yǒuxìng’s purgative protocol places Minamoto in dialogue with — and against — the mainstream Qīng wēnbìng school of 葉桂 / Yè Tiānshì.