Listening Diagnosis

Listening diagnosis is one of the four diagnostic methods of traditional Chinese medicine—observation, listening, questioning, and pulse-taking—in which the physician uses hearing and smell to infer patterns of illness by listening to the sounds the patient makes and smelling the odors of the patient's body and sickroom. This book, a monograph on diagnostics in traditional Chinese medicine by Shao Nianfang, offers a systematic discussion of this method. It proceeds along two general lines. The first is "listening to sounds": analyzing the pitch, strength, clarity, turbidity, slowness, and urgency of speech, breathing, coughing, vomiting, hiccups, belching, sighing, and bowel sounds to judge the rise and decline of healthy qi and the nature of pathogenic qi—for example, loud, coarse, heavy, and turbid sounds usually indicate excess or heat patterns, while low, faint breathing indicates deficiency or cold patterns; disordered speech is mostly attributed to the heart, abnormalities of breathing and coughing mostly concern the lungs, and vomiting, hiccups, and belching mostly indicate failure of stomach qi to descend. The second is "smelling odors": distinguishing the odors of the patient's breath, sweat, phlegm and nasal discharge, urine and stool, and menstrual and vaginal secretions, as well as odors in the sickroom, in order to identify cold and heat, deficiency and excess, and the location of pathogens—sour, putrid, and foul odors mostly indicate excess heat, while fishy and thin ones mostly indicate deficiency cold. The book emphasizes that listening diagnosis must be combined with observation, questioning, and pulse-taking and should not be used in isolation; it also organizes the traditional theory correlating the five sounds (calling, laughing, singing, crying, groaning), the five tones (jue, zhi, gong, shang, yu), and the five viscera. On the whole it is a clinical reference work rooted in the classics, suitable as supplementary reading for the study of the listening method within the four diagnostics. It should be noted that the book was printed long ago and circulating copies are mostly scanned reproductions with incomplete and inconsistent copyright-page information; for the specific edition and publication details, please refer to the physical copy.