Medical Accounts

Medical Accounts (Yishu) in sixteen juan was compiled by the Qing dynasty Xin'an physician Cheng Wenyou, courtesy name Guanquan, style name Xingxuan, a native of She County, Anhui. From his young adulthood the author devoted himself to medicine, and in his spare moments from practice he read medical books and jotted down notes as he went, gradually completing the work between the fifty-seventh year of the Qianlong reign and the ninth year of the Daoguang reign (roughly 1792–1829); it was first printed in the sixth year of Daoguang (1826), and the title takes its meaning from "transmitting rather than authoring." Moved by the vastness of medical literature and the difficulty students faced in reading it all, Cheng extensively gathered discussions from the Lingshu and Suwen down through the masters of the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming, drawing on more than 320 ancient and modern medical books and more than 40 works of classics, history, philosophy, and belles-lettres. He assembled more than 650 passages of canonical meaning, more than 5,000 famous discourses of earlier sages, 284 case records, and 191 appended formulas, divided into 130 sections and 570 categories. The structure is as follows: Tracing the Origins of Medicine in two juan, tracing medical principles to their source; Pulling the Threads of Cold Damage and Resolving Doubts in Cold Damage, one juan each, classifying the original text of the Treatise on Cold Damage by outline and analyzing difficulties in pulse method, transmission through the channels, and pattern differentiation; A Comprehensive Reference on Miscellaneous Patterns in eight juan, gathering the causes, pulse signs, and treatments of internal medicine conditions; and Original Principles of Gynecology, Essentials of Pediatrics (also called Collected Essentials of Pediatrics), The Essence of Smallpox and Measles, and Preparations of Formulas and Materia Medica, one juan each, covering gynecology, pediatrics, smallpox and measles, and formulas and materia medica. All the assembled discourses are sourced, for "the assembled words of many are sought only for their essential points," and no editorial comments are added, so the selection is strict and refined. The general principles describe it as "transmitting rather than authoring" yet "selecting the essential from the broad," and it opened the way for systematic excerpting of the medical discourses of various schools; modern scholarship lists it among the "ten great complete medical books" of Chinese medical history, and it is an important representative work of Xin'an medicine. In 1983 Anhui Scientific and Technical Publishers issued a popular edition based on old editions, a single hardcover volume of about 900,000 characters, which is the main current edition for contemporary readers studying the book.