叶天士

Ye Tianshi is a physician of far-reaching influence in the history of Chinese medicine. Publicly available information about his life is limited, and neither his dates of birth and death nor his nationality is definitively recorded, yet as many as nine works attributed to him survive. The titles collected here—Linzheng Zhi'nan Yi'an (Medical Cases as a Guide to Clinical Practice), Weikeben Ye Tianshi Yi'an (Unengraved Medical Cases of Ye Tianshi), Ye Tianshi Yi'an Jinghua (Essence of Ye Tianshi's Medical Cases), Yixiao Michuan (Secret Transmission of Medical Efficacy), and Xu Pi Ye Tianshi Wannian Fang'an Zhenben (A True Edition of Xu's Annotated Late-Life Prescriptions of Ye Tianshi)—are mostly records of medical cases and compilations of clinical experience, documenting diagnostic reasoning, prescriptions, and therapeutic insights in concise, practical prose. These works have long been valued by later students of medical case literature; they are classed among medical and classic works and are also often read for literary appreciation, showing that their accounts possess both medical value and readability. Given the limited sources, details of his life remain to be further investigated.