The Complete Book of Leprosy

The Complete Book of Leprosy is a monograph on leprosy (called li feng or li ji in antiquity) by the Qing dynasty physician Xiao Xiaoting (style name Master Xiaoting, a native of Luling, present-day Ji'an in Jiangxi, who died around 1801). Xiao Xiaoting inherited his family's medical learning and excelled in treating leprosy; he collected secret texts on treating the disease from various schools and incorporated his own years of clinical experience, completing in the first year of the Jiaqing reign (1796) one volume each of Collected Essentials on Leprosy and Prepared Essentials on Leprosy. Unable to afford publication, he set them aside for years; later edited and collated by Yuan Chuntai and others, they were published during the Daoguang reign (around 1836), initially titled The Complete Book of Leprosy, and were reprinted many times thereafter, with the widely circulated edition titled The Complete Book of Leprosy. During the Guangxu reign, a further volume, Dialectical Differentiation of Leprosy, was appended, making the content more complete. The book has three volumes: first, "Eight Principles of Antiquity," citing discussions of leprosy from classic medical works and famous physicians; next, "Twenty-One Discourses on Leprosy," expounding the key points of diagnosis, treatment and contraindications; then "Illustrated Explanations of Thirty-Six Leprosy Syndromes," combining illustrations and text, analyzing causes, pulses and treatments in detail and describing various leprosy symptoms; finally, it turns to treatment, proposing "Five Not to Treat" and "Five Main Treatments," establishing nine methods of internal treatment (general, differentiated, mild, drastic, tonifying, purgative, combined, analogous and supplementary) and six methods of external treatment (needling, moxibustion, burning, fumigation and washing, sloughing, and application), with appended formulas for standard, modified, purgative and external treatments as well as methods such as mole removal and thunder-fire needling, containing over 180 formulas and making frequent use of the flesh of the great chaulmoogra. The book explicitly states that leprosy is a serious infectious disease, advocates isolation and prevention, and rejects the old saying that it "must recur and cannot be cured," holding that recurrence is mostly due to interrupted or incomplete treatment. In principles of treatment it emphasizes "always chiefly cooling the blood and harmonizing it, with dispelling wind and dampness as auxiliaries, examining the deficiency or excess of vital qi, and treating according to the six meridians"; for men it favors nourishing blood and dispelling wind, for women invigorating blood and drying dampness. Following Zhang Zhongjing's method of the six meridians, the book sets out its outline and entries, with refined argumentation and gentle prescriptions. It is an important document for the understanding and treatment of leprosy in Chinese medicine and has reference value for later and modern leprosy prevention and control. The People's Medical Publishing House issued a punctuated and collated typeset edition in 1990 based on a reliable version, included in the Series of Collated Classical Works of Chinese Medicine.