Reading the Medical Classics

Reading the Medical Classics is a thematic compilation with commentary on the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon, edited by the Qing physician Shen Youpeng. Shen Youpeng, courtesy name Yaofeng, was a native of Jiashan, Zhejiang, versed in astrology and geomancy and especially accomplished in medicine; he also wrote Reading the Treatise on Cold Damage, Essentials of Gynecology, and A Critique of Wang Mengying's Medical Cases. He held that the Basic Questions and the Numinous Pivot were not written by one hand, that genuine and spurious material was mixed and their aims not uniform; so, with the principle of "discarding the false and keeping the true, discarding the wrong and keeping the right," he cut the redundant, gathered the essential, and rearranged the selected passages by category. The book was completed in the twenty-ninth year of the Qianlong reign (1764). It runs to four volumes, divided into four collections: Ping ("normal"), Bing ("illness"), Zhen ("diagnosis"), and Zhi ("treatment"). The Ping collection takes its name from the Basic Questions chapter "Discourse on the Signs of the Normal Person" and gathers passages on the physiology of the healthy; the Bing collection sets out disease patterns and mechanisms; the Zhen collection assembles diagnostic methods; and the Zhi collection lists therapeutic principles and methods. Brief editorial notes are interspersed, concise and to the point, discussing outwardly the correspondence between heaven and humanity and inwardly the workings of the viscera, qi, and blood, joined from beginning to end in a single thread. Among the classified studies of the Inner Canon since the Ming and Qing, it is one of the more concise, though its selected passages are less refined than Li Zhongzi's Essentials of the Inner Canon. Extant editions include the Zhongjian Tang collection edition of the thirty-first year of Qianlong and the San San Yi Shu edition. This edition is a collated volume in the China Ancient Medical Texts Publishing House series "100 Rare Ancient Medical Texts: Collected, Collated, and Studied."