Zhōngguó yīyào lùnwén jí 中國醫藥論文集
Collected Essays on Chinese Medicine and Pharmacology by 富士川遊 (撰)
About the work
The Zhōngguó yīyào lùnwén jí 中國醫藥論文集 (Japanese Chūgoku iyaku ronbunshū) is a Chinese-translation collection of selected historical-medical essays by 富士川遊 Fujikawa Yū 富士川遊 (1865–1940), the founding figure of modern Japanese medical-history scholarship and the author of the canonical Nihon igakushi 日本醫學史 (Japanese Medical History, 1904, with major expansions 1922 and 1941). The collection is the closing volume of the Shanghai HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū 皇漢醫學叢書 (Shanghai: Shìjiè Shūjú, 1936), ed. Chén Cúnrén 陳存仁, into which it was translated and edited specifically for Republican-Chinese readers as a historical orientation to the kanpō tradition the rest of the series transmits. The work is independently catalogued in the hxwd series as KR3ec085 in the present knowledgebase.
Abstract
The opening essay, 皇漢醫學變遷史 (“A History of the Transformation of Kōkan-medicine”), is the centrepiece of the collection — a compact synthesis of the entire arc of Japanese medical history from prehistory to the Meiji period, written in essay form and structured around the major textual moments:
- Pre-classical Japan: archaeological and Kojiki / Nihon shoki evidence for drug-knowledge (rénshēn, fùzǐ, hòupò, gāncǎo, hújiāo, dānshā, bājí, dàhuáng) already in the legendary period; the question whether early Japanese medicine was indigenous, Korean-mediated, or Chinese in origin, with Fujikawa’s signature philological-archaeological method.
- Suí-period transmission (594–608): the embassy of Eihi 惠日 to Suí China and his return in 608 carrying the Bìngyuán hòu lùn 病源候論 (Zhūbìng yuánhòu lùn of 巢元方 Cháo Yuánfāng, 610) — the earliest substantial transmission of the systematic Chinese disease-classification to Japan.
- Nara to Heian (700–1000): the indigenization of the imported corpus; the composition of 丹波康賴 Tamba no Yasuyori’s 丹波康賴 Yīxīn fāng 醫心方 (982/984) as the Japanese epitome of SuíTáng Chinese medicine, including the fángzhōng 房內 (bedchamber-arts) corpus that was lost in continental China; the Yīxīn fāng’s subsequent rediscovery as a witness to lost Chinese sources.
- Kamakura and Muromachi: indigenous Japanese-language medical literature; the Manyasu fang and Buddhist-monastic medicine; the early travel-students to Sòng / Yuán / Míng China.
- Sengoku and early Edo: the Manase-school Goseihō tradition of Manase Dōsan 曲直瀬道三 (1507–1594) and Imaōji Genyū 今大路玄又 (the Keiteki shū 啓迪集) — the assimilation of the late-Míng synthesis of JīnYuán four-master speculative medicine into Japanese practice, and the dominant school of the 16th–17th centuries.
- Mid-Edo Kohōha revolution: 吉益爲則 Yoshimasu Tōdō 吉益東洞 and the radical return to Zhāng Zhòngjǐng’s Shānghán canon — the doctrinal triad of the Yī duàn (1759, KR3eu069), Lèijù fāng (1762, KR3eu063), and Yào zhēng (1771, KR3eu072) — the principal Japanese medical-doctrinal achievement of the 18th century.
- Late-Edo Tamba philological school: 丹波元簡 Tamba no Genkan and the Igakukan 醫學館 textual-critical project, producing the modern textus receptus of Sùwèn, Língshū, Shānghán lùn, etc.
- Edo Rangaku-medicine: the parallel rise of Dutch-learning-mediated Western anatomy and surgery, from Sugita Genpaku’s 1774 Kaitai shinsho through the early-19th-century syncretic clinical practice.
- Meiji medical reform: the 1874 Iseirei 醫制令 imposing Western-medical licensing, the collapse of the official Igakukan, the Hakusaidō / Onchi-sha resistance movement of the 1870s–1880s (cf. KR3eu053 Jiǎoqì gàilùn), and the survival of kanpō into the modern period as a residual / popular tradition.
The remaining essays in the collection treat individual topics: a critical history of Japanese acupuncture from Sugiyama Wa’ichi (杉山和一) to the Meiji period; a survey of Edo honzō (materia medica) scholarship from Kaibara Ekiken to the Tamba family; the history of the Japanese reception of the Běncǎo gāngmù; biographical notices of the principal Edo and Meiji medical figures.
Fujikawa’s method throughout is the disciplined modern-historiographical synthesis characteristic of his magnum opus, the Nihon igakushi — primary-source citation, philological precision, and a refusal of nationalist or chauvinist framing in either direction. The essays were composed across a long career, beginning in the 1890s; their Chinese translation and 1936 publication in the HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū is part of the inter-war Japanese-Chinese collaborative medical-historical project (with 陳存仁 Chén Cúnrén as the principal Chinese editor).
Composition is therefore bracketed: the underlying Japanese-language essays span Fujikawa’s mature career, ca. 1900 to 1936, with publication in the hxwd Chinese translation in 1936. The work was widely read in Republican China and is one of the principal early Chinese-language introductions to the Japanese kanpō historical tradition.
Translations and research
- Fujikawa Yū. 1934. Japanese Medicine (English translation by John Ruhräh of Nihon igakushi). New York: Paul B. Hoeber — the principal English-language access-point to Fujikawa’s historiography (substantively overlaps the present Chinese translation).
- Bowers, John Z. 1965. Medical Education in Japan: From Chinese Medicine to Western Medicine. New York: Hoeber Medical Division of Harper & Row — descends from Fujikawa.
- Sakai Shizu 酒井シヅ. 1982. Nihon no iryōshi 日本の医療史. Tokyo: Tokyo Shoseki — the principal modern Japanese update to Fujikawa.
- Lock, Margaret. 1980. East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan: Varieties of Medical Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press — for the post-war kanpō tradition.
Other points of interest
The placement of Fujikawa’s collection as the closing volume of the 1936 HuángHàn yīxué cóngshū is editorially deliberate: where the rest of the series transmits specific Japanese medical works to the Chinese audience, this volume gives the Chinese reader the historiographical framework within which to understand that transmission. The cóngshū as a whole — and the hxwd corpus in the present knowledgebase that descends from it — is the most significant single Republican-period transmission of Japanese kanpō literature into Chinese hands, and Fujikawa’s essay collection is its scholarly preface.