Zhōngguó jiēgǔ túshuō 中國接骨圖說
Illustrated Treatise on Bone-Setting (in the Chūgoku [i.e. western-Japan] Manner) by 二宮獻 (撰)
About the work
The Zhōngguó jiēgǔ túshuō 中國接骨圖說 (Japanese Chūgoku sekkotsu zusetsu; also transmitted as Seikotsuhan 正骨範), 2 juàn, is the first major Japanese orthopaedic-manipulation treatise and the principal pre-modern Japanese textbook of bone-setting (jiēgǔ 接骨 / seikotsu), composed by 二宮獻 Ninomiya Ken 二宮獻 (zì Hikoka / Hikoyoshi 彥可, 1754–1827), medical officer of the Hamada han 濱田藩 in Iwami province (modern Shimane). The title-element Zhōngguó 中國 refers to the Chūgoku region of western Honshū — the author’s home territory — and not to imperial China, as the hxwd-series transmission to China might mislead a reader to assume. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3el019 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The compositional history is set out in three prefaces preserved in the source. The author’s own preface (Bunka 4 / 12 = winter 1807) reports that he travelled west to Nagasaki where, through the Dutch-translator Yoshio Kōgyū 吉雄耕牛 (1724–1800), he was introduced to the bone-setter Yoshihara Genmuda 吉原元棟 (sobriquet Kyōinsai 杏隱齋 / Kyōin 杏陰; zì Ryūsen 隆仙), a former bushi (元武弁) who had retired from the warrior class to practise medicine and who had developed the jujutsu / kuatsu tradition of 死活拳法 shi-katsu kenpō (“dead-or-alive boxing-method”) into a system of orthopaedic manual manipulation. Ninomiya studied under Yoshihara, returning home after his teacher’s death to systematise and expand the inherited corpus over more than twenty years.
The architecture of the system, in its mature form: 15 mother-methods (母法 mǔfǎ), 36 child-methods (子法 zǐfǎ), and 150 kneading-methods (揉法 róufǎ) — collectively, Ninomiya frames his system as a finer-grained replacement for the abstract eight-methods scheme of MōJiēDuānTíÀnMóTuīNá (摸接端提按摩推拿) given in the Zhènggǔ xīnfǎ yàozhǐ 正骨心法要旨 section of the imperial Qīng Yīzōng jīnjiàn 醫宗金鑑 (1742). The mother-methods are named after image-mnemonics: 探珠 probing-the-pearl, 弄玉 fondling-the-jade, 靡風 wind-flattening, 車轉 wheel-turning, 圓旋 circular-rotation, 螺旋 spiral, 躍魚 leaping-fish, 游魚 swimming-fish, 熊顧 bear-looking-back, 鸞翔 phoenix-soaring, 鶴跨 crane-straddling, 騎龍 riding-the-dragon, 燕尾 swallow-tail, 鴒尾 wagtail-tail, 尺蠖 inchworm. Each method is illustrated and explained with case-examples drawn from Ninomiya’s two-decade practice. Western (Dutch) anatomy informs the underlying skeletal scheme but the Dutch reliance on mechanical apparatus is explicitly rejected in favour of the hands-only Japanese manipulation tradition.
The senior preface by 丹波元簡 Tamba no Genkan 丹波元簡 (sobriquet Liánfū 廉夫, the Edo Igakukan 醫學館 director), dated Bunka 5 / summer (= 1808), explicitly contrasts the present work favourably with the Yīzōng jīnjiàn — Ninomiya’s treatise is to the imperial Qīng manual “as a jewelled cup to a clay bowl” — and endorses Ninomiya’s exceptional ethical decision (by Edo standards) to publish his teacher’s name and credit rather than passing the lineage off as his own innovation. A second preface by the Rangaku 蘭學 physician Katsuragawa Hoshū III 桂川國瑞 (sobriquet Keien 桂園, 1751–1809), dated Bunka 3 / 6 (= 1806), records the Katsuragawa-family Western-surgery house’s adoption of Ninomiya’s kakuren 裹簾 (wrap-and-splint) protocol.
Composition is therefore securely bracketed between 1807 (author’s preface) and 1808 (Tamba preface, publication year). The work was reprinted multiple times in Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka and was transmitted to China in the late-Qīng / Republican period, entering 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.
Translations and research
- Mizuno Hideki 水野秀樹. 2002. “Seikotsuhan 正骨範 to Ninomiya Hikoka 二宮彥可” — Japanese orthopaedic-history scholarship.
- Ishihara Akira 石原明. 1959. Nihon no igaku 日本の医学. Tokyo: Shibundō — synthesises the place of Ninomiya in the development of seikotsu.
- Macé, Mieko. 2003. “L’évolution de la médecine japonaise face au modèle chinois.” In Daruma: Revue d’études japonaises — for the Edo medical-tradition framework.
No book-length Western-language monograph on the work specifically located.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the most influential transmissions of an Edo technical tradition into the Chinese medical world via Tāngběn Qiúzhēn’s 1936 series; the descendant tradition of Japanese seikotsu / jūdō-seifuku 柔道整復 manual orthopaedic therapy is licensed in modern Japan as a separate medical paramedical profession and traces its lineage textually to the Seikotsuhan.