Shēngshēngtáng zhìyàn 生生堂治驗
Clinical Records from the Shēng-shēng (Life-Giving) Hall by 中神琴溪 (撰) and 小野遜 (編)
About the work
The Shēngshēngtáng zhìyàn 生生堂治驗 (Japanese Seiseidō chiken), 2 juàn, is the clinical case-record collection of the Kyoto physician 中神琴溪 Nakagami Kinkei 中神琴溪 (1744–1833), founder of the Seiseidō 生生堂 clinic and one of the principal second-generation teachers of the Edo Kohōha 古方派 lineage descended from 吉益爲則 Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益爲則. The records were compiled by Nakagami’s domain-junior pupil Ono Son 小野遜 (zì Kyōfu 匡輔) over the period of his Kyoto study. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3eq055 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The preface, by Nakagami’s domain colleague Ikoma Atsu 生駒厚 (signed Tóngfān 同藩 “same domain”), is dated Kyōwa 3 / 12 = late winter / early 1804 (享和癸亥季冬). The preface gives the compilation history: Ono Son, a third-generation physician of his family, had completed his hereditary medical training and felt the need for a substantive teacher; he travelled to Kyoto, studied for several years under Nakagami at the Seiseidō, and on returning home brought a manuscript notebook of cases observed at the clinic, compiled “in the evenings at lamp-light, two or three sheets at a time” (夜間燈下, 稍稍謄一二紙). At Ikoma’s urging Ono prepared the manuscript for printing — Ikoma’s preface argues that the master’s clinical wisdom must not be kept private to the family but should be made available “to spare others the calamity of untimely death.”
The senior preface gives the doctrinal character of Nakagami’s Seiseidō practice: the Kohōha programmatic framework is preserved (back-to-Zhāng-Zhòng-jǐng, rejection of speculative theory), but the rigid Yoshimasu Tōdō purgative-and-aconite signature is softened. Ikoma writes: “Where it should be downward-and-cooling, he treats with emetic; where it should be warming, he treats with cooling — and you cannot guess in advance what he will do.” Nakagami’s earlier work Yī tán 醫談 had attracted criticism for one-sidedness on the side of tonification (“not opposed to warming-and-tonifying, indeed in favour of attacking-and-purging — and so unable to escape the charge of one-sidedness”; Nakagami himself attributed this to “the headstrong air of his early years”). The present work is Ikoma’s testimony that the mature Nakagami had achieved a synthesis: “taking standards from ZhōuHàn [the Shānghán canon], referring to the SòngYuán material, also handling cautiously the Western [Dutch rangaku] tradition, broadly gathering the formulae, taking the middle path between ancient and modern, to establish a single household tradition.” This is a typical late-Edo kohōha-with-flexibility position.
The case-record format follows the standard Edo kanpō genre: each case opens with the patient’s social position (a retainer’s wife, a daimyō’s child, a townsman, etc.) and prior treatment history (typically a series of unsuccessful attempts by other physicians), followed by Nakagami’s diagnostic procedure (often opening with abdominal palpation, Kohōha-style), prescription with full dose-list, and outcome with timing. Cases include acute febrile epidemics, chronic qì-blood disorders, paediatric and obstetric emergencies, mental-illness cases (where Nakagami had a particular reputation), and a variety of surgical-and-orthopedic cases at the boundary of the kanpō practice. The work is one of the principal sources for late-Edo Kyoto kanpō clinical practice.
Composition is securely 1804 by the dated preface. The work was transmitted to China and entered the Shanghai HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), ed. Chén Cúnrén 陳存仁 — the immediate vector for the hxwd-series text.
Translations and research
No substantial Western-language scholarship of the work specifically located.
- Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine.” Journal of Japanese Studies 39 (2): 299–324 — for the late-Edo kohōha clinical-practice context.
- Otsuka Yasuo 大塚敬節. 1989. Kanpō ishi no negaikoto 漢方医師の願いごと. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō.
- Lock, Margaret. 1980. East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press — for the long arc of post-Tōdō kanpō clinical practice into the modern period.
Other points of interest
Nakagami Kinkei’s Seiseidō clinic was, with the contemporary Yoshimasu-school Kōdō-juku 古道塾 of Yoshimasu Naomichi 吉益南涯 (Tōdō’s son) and the Tōdō-juku of the older generation, one of the three principal late-Edo Kyoto teaching clinics in the Kohōha lineage. The case-record genre — to which Nakagami’s record contributes substantively — was the principal Edo kanpō literary form for the clinical evidence that the school’s doctrinal radicalism rested upon, and its modern descendant remains the shōrei 症例 case-record literature of contemporary Japanese kanpō.