Xièyì xīnlùn 瀉疫新論
A New Treatise on Purging Epidemic (Cholera) by 高島久貫 (撰)
About the work
The Xièyì xīnlùn 瀉疫新論 (Japanese Sha-eki shinron), 2 juàn, is a clinical monograph on cholera and other acute purging-epidemic diseases by the late-Edo / Bakumatsu Japanese kanpō 漢方 physician 高島久貫 Takashima Hisanuki 高島久貫 (sobriquet Tíngxuě 停雪 Teisetsu). The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3eg045 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The composition history is recorded explicitly in the two prefaces preserved in the source-file frontmatter. The senior preface, by the Edo physician-bibliophile 山田業廣 Yamada Gyōkō 山田業廣 and dated Meiji 12 (= 1879) ninth month, reports that the Anseiwùwǔ 安政戊午 = 1858 cholera epidemic in Edo killed people “by tens of thousands,” that conventional kanpō physicians were left helpless, and that Takashima — by sustained study and clinical experimentation — found that purgation with mirabilite-and-rhubarb (硝黃 xiāohuáng — mángxiāo 芒硝 + dàhuáng 大黃) saved very many lives, and on the basis of this experience composed the present treatise. Yamada explicitly aligns Takashima’s doctrinal stance with 吳有性 Wú Yǒuxìng’s Wēnyì lùn (1642) purgative paradigm — Takashima is “able to obtain the marrow of Mr. Wú, then change his bones and recast his form” — and frames the work as a corrective “acupuncture-to-the-crown” against the contemporary preference for tonification (補) over purgation (瀉).
The colophon by Takashima’s grandson Takashima Hisakei 高島久敬軌 (also Meiji 12 = 1879) gives the textual transmission: the manuscript drafted from the 1858 epidemic was never printed during Hisanuki’s lifetime (“祖考易簀, 書亦委在筐底” — “with my grandfather’s passing the book lay forgotten at the bottom of a basket”), but in the renewed cholera outbreaks of the mid-1870s the grandson and his father continued to use it as the family’s standard cholera-treatment reference. The new Meiji medical-policing regime — mandatory reporting of cases, quarantine hospitals, penalties for delayed reporting — created urgent demand for a reliable kanpō protocol, and the father then revised and expanded the manuscript for printing in 1879. The text as we have it is therefore the 1879 expanded recension of a 1858 draft.
Composition is bracketed accordingly: notBefore = 1858 (the Ansei 5 cholera epidemic that prompted the original clinical observations); notAfter = 1879 (the Meiji 12 publication of the revised text by the grandson, with Yamada Gyōkō’s preface). The text was transmitted to China through the Republican-period kanpō revival and entered 湯本求真 Tāngběn Qiúzhēn’s Huáng Hàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), the immediate vector for the hxwd-series text in 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 / Bakumatsu kanpō context.
- Johnston, William. 1995. The Modern Epidemic: A History of Tuberculosis in Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center — useful comparative reference for Meiji epidemic medicine and quarantine policy.
Other points of interest
The text is one of the clearest documents of how the Wú Yǒuxìng purgative paradigm — controversial in Qīng China and largely supplanted by the wēnbìng school of 葉桂 / Yè Tiānshì — survived and flourished in Edo kanpō practice, where it found in 19th-century cholera an exact-fit clinical use case. Yamada Gyōkō’s framing of Takashima as Wú’s true successor is part of a broader Bakumatsu-to-Meiji effort to defend the classical kanpō tradition against the rising tide of European biomedicine.