Hé Mèngyáo 何夢瑤 (zì Bàozhī 報之, hào Xīchí 西池, 1693–1764, CBDB 78835), native of Nánhǎi 南海 (Guǎngdōng), one of the so-called Lǐngnán Sìjūnzǐ 嶺南四君子 of the early Qiánlóng era. Jìnshì 1730, after which he held county magistracies in Yìníng 義寧, Yángshuò 陽朔, Cénxī 岑溪 and Sī’ēn 思恩 (Guǎngxī), and finally a circuit prefect’s appointment at Liáoyáng 遼陽 in the northeast.
A polymath in the late-Ming-into-Qing literatus tradition: deeply learned in the Confucian classics, in mathematics and Western calendrical methods, in music and qū-melody (his Jīngshǐ yuèlǚ tōngyì 經史樂律通義 is a substantial musicological work), and in Chinese medicine, to which he turned principally as a jīngshì 經世 (statecraft) instrument when overseeing public-health interventions in his magistracies — most famously the suppression of an epidemic at Sī’ēn through the public distribution of his own prescriptions, which the governor-general endorsed for circulation across the surrounding counties.
His principal medical works are the Yī biàn 醫碥 (KR3eh005, 1751) — the foundational textbook of Lǐngnán internal medicine — together with the Shānghán lùn jìnyán 傷寒論近言, the Fùkē jíyào 婦科輯要, the Yòukē jíyào 幼科輯要, the Dòuzhěn jíyào 痘疹輯要, the Běncǎo yùnyǔ 本草韻語, and the Zhēnjiǔ chuīyún jí 針灸吹雲集. The Yī biàn is doctrinally aligned with Liú Wánsù and Zhū Dānxī’s cooling-yīn-nourishing tradition and is sharply polemical against the Qiánlóng-era Lǐngnán fashion for Zhāng Jièbīn–style warming-tonification — Hé writes that “桂、附之毒，等於刀鋸” (the toxicity of cinnamon and aconite is the equivalent of knives and saws). The work is the founding text of the Qing Lǐngnán hánwēn zhī zhèng 寒溫之爭 (cold-vs-warming controversy).
Hé died at Nánhǎi in Qiánlóng 29 = 1764, aged 72.