Querying Cold Damage

Querying Cold Damage is a medical treatise completed in 1944 by the modern renowned physician Zhu Weiju (1884–1951) and his disciple Chen Susheng in the form of questions and challenges. It was first titled Records of Questions and Answers Within the Master's School and later arranged and given its present title. The whole book runs as a dialogue between master and disciple: Chen Susheng raises doubts, and Zhu Weiju answers them one by one, systematically discussing the six-channel system, the nature of pathogenic factors, the stages of disease, and therapeutic principles in the Treatise on Cold Damage. Grounded in clinical practice, Zhu Weiju held that Chinese medicine is a medicine based on healthy qi, that the six-channel patterns are six major categories of patterns arising as the body's healthy qi resists pathogens, and that these can be summarized into five stages—beginning resistance, insufficient resistance, excessive resistance, deficient resistance, and final resistance—the so-called "five-stage theory of cold damage." He was also the first to summarize diagnostic principles with the "eight principles," forming the "five stages and eight principles" doctrine. In treatment he emphasized supporting healthy qi and warming yang with warm-heat medicinals, making frequent use of aconite and other yang-warming drugs, and thus was known as "Aconite Zhu." The book also questions the warm disease school's views on cause, interception, and reversal, advocates communication and mutual learning between Chinese and Western medical theory, and includes in its appendix his proposal for establishing an "experimental hospital of Chinese medicine." It is an important document for studying the modern transformation of Chinese medicine and the thought of the Fire Spirit school.