Selected Medical Cases from Taihe

Selected Medical Cases from Taihe is a collection of clinical case records compiled by the Shaanxi traditional Chinese medicine physician Yao Shutang (1923–2007), published by Shaanxi Science and Technology Press in 1988. Yao Shutang was a native of Wu'an, Hebei, born into a family of hereditary physicians; he served as director of the traditional Chinese medicine department at Xi'an Red Cross Hospital and practised medicine for more than forty years. According to the author's own account, from 1975 he harbored the wish to organize the "Secret Records of the Taihe Clinic," handed down through four generations of his family, and in 1982, by then sixty years old, he compiled his ancestral clinical experience together with his own insights into a book. The book is divided into four parts—internal medicine, gynecology, pediatrics, and surgery and miscellaneous diseases—containing 33 internal medicine cases, 12 gynecology cases, 11 pediatrics cases, and 17 surgery and miscellaneous disease cases, 73 in total, covering several dozen conditions including common cold, cough, dyspnea syndrome, phlegm-fluid retention, asthma, lung abscess, stomach duct pain, diarrhea, wasting-thirst, dizziness, headache, palpitations, chest impediment, wind-stroke, impediment syndrome, dysmenorrhea, uterine bleeding, breast lumps, measles, mumps, whooping cough, malnutrition in children, bone-attaching abscess, gangrene of the extremities, urinary retention, goiter, sinusitis, and mouth sores. Each case record generally sets out the manifestations of the condition, the line of pattern identification, the prescription and medicinals used, and the treatment outcome, concentrating on presenting the complete process of treatment based on pattern identification and reflecting the prescribing characteristics of Yao's family formulas. The book is modest in length and clear in organization, and serves as reference material for understanding the Shaanxi local tradition of traditional Chinese medicine and the individual experience of a clinician.