俞弁

Yu Bian, whose courtesy name, native place, and dates of birth and death are all unknown, has only very limited publicly available information. Judging from the works held in the collection, he was involved in two fields: medicine and poetry criticism. In medicine, he wrote Xu Yishuo (Sequel to the Remarks on Medicine), which follows the earlier genre of medical talks, gathering case records, medical discussions, and clinical observations, and belongs to the tradition of medical notebooks. In poetry, he wrote Yilaotang Shihua (Poetry Talks from the Hall of the Retired Elder), which comments in essayistic form on poets and poems of successive ages, discussing diction, conception, and the merits and faults of poetic styles, and shows a clear literati flavor of talking about the art of poetry. Although the two subjects are far apart, both works adopt the note-taking manner, recording items one by one and composed at random, with emphasis on personal reading and observations rather than on building a systematic theory. As far as the extant materials show, Yu Bian's writings have some reference value for understanding the forms of ancient medical talks and poetry talks, while his life still awaits the discovery of new sources.