Zhōngguó érkē yījiàn 中國兒科醫鑑
A Mirror of Chinese Paediatric Medicine by 大塚敬節 (撰)
About the work
The Zhōngguó érkē yījiàn 中國兒科醫鑑 (Japanese reading Chūgoku jika ikan) is a short modern paediatric reference in 1 juàn by the founder of the modern Japanese kanpō 漢方 movement, 大塚敬節 Ōtsuka Keisetsu 大塚敬節 (1900–1980), composed for the Chinese audience as a contribution to the Shanghai HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 of 1936. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3ej031 (where applicable) in the present knowledgebase; the catalog’s variant glyph 大塜 for 大塚 in the author field is a transmissional slip, not a different person.
Abstract
The work integrates early-20th-century Western paediatric diagnostics with classical kanpō formula prescription, and is one of the clearest documents of the early Shōwa-period kanpō revival’s methodological compromise with biomedicine — the strategy with which Ōtsuka, working from his medical training at Kumamoto Medical College (graduated 1922), repackaged Yoshimasu Tōdō’s koihō 古醫方 (Ancient-Formula School) therapeutics for a 20th-century biomedical readership.
The structure of each chapter is uniform: a modern Western nosological identification of the disease (e.g., for measles 麻疹: incubation period in days, prodromal symptoms, Koplik’s spots (克蒲利子枯氏斑) as the pathognomonic mucosal sign, the timing of the exanthem, temperature curves, and the standard complications — otitis media, pneumonia, meningitis), followed by a formula-therapeutic recommendation list drawn from the Shānghán lùn 傷寒論 and Jīnguì yàolüè 金匱要略 (大塚’s lifelong textual base) and from later Chinese-and-Japanese sources. For measles: gégēn tāng 葛根湯 in the prodromal and early-eruptive stage, xiǎocháihú tāng 小柴胡湯 as the eruption develops, the shígāo 石膏-bearing formulae (大青龍湯, 越婢加半夏湯, 白虎加人參湯, 竹葉石膏湯) when high fever and oral dryness dominate, and so on through the complications.
Each chapter closes with a bèikǎo 備考 (“for reference”) block of classical citations — invariably including Bǎoyīng cuōyào 保嬰撮要 (Míng paediatric reference), Zhāngshì yītōng 張氏醫通 (Zhāng Lù 1695), Lèijù fāng guǎngyì 類聚方廣義 (the 尾臺榕堂 koihō commentary on Yoshimasu Tōdō’s Lèijù fāng 類聚方), and the Lìyuán zázuǎn 慄園雜纂 (淺田宗伯’s clinical miscellany) — making the work both a modern paediatric pocket-guide and a brief anthology of the classical and Edo kanpō paediatric tradition.
The work has no internal dating but is bracketed by Ōtsuka’s 1927 meeting with 湯本求真 Tāngběn Qiúzhēn Yumoto Kyūshin (the event that turned him from Western practice to kanpō) on the early side and by the 1936 publication of the HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū on the late side. Composition in the early-to-mid 1930s is the conservative estimate; the work is the earliest substantial paediatric publication of Ōtsuka’s mature career and predates his canonical 1936 editio princeps of the Kāngpíng 康平 manuscript of the Shānghán lùn (KR3ef003).
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language scholarship of the work specifically located.
- Lock, Margaret. 1980. East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press — the standard English anthropological study of post-war Japanese kanpō, with detailed treatment of Ōtsuka and the Tōyō Igaku Kenkyūjo.
- Triplett, Katja. 2020. Buddhism and Medicine in Japan: A Topical Survey (500–1600 CE) of a Complex Relationship. Berlin: De Gruyter — for broader Japanese medical-historical context.
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39 (2): 299–324 — for the kanpō tradition Ōtsuka revived.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the principal artefacts of Ōtsuka’s strategic decision to make kanpō legible to Chinese readers in modern biomedical language — a strategy that, paradoxically, helped seed the post-1949 Mainland Chinese Zhōngyī 中醫 standardisation movement, since the disease-by-disease modern-Western nosological framework with classical-formula therapy was much closer to PRC-era Zhōngxīyī jiéhé 中西醫結合 (integrative Chinese-Western medicine) practice than the more philological Edo-era kanpō from which it descended.