True Transmission of Diagnosis and Treatment

The True Transmission of Diagnosis and Treatment, compiled in the late Ming by the physician Yuan Ban (style name Tiyan, a native of Gaoyou, Jiangsu, and once an adviser to the Minister of War Shi Kefa), is a treatise on medical theory that took shape around the Chongzhen reign. Shi Kefa wrote a preface for it, calling it a work that "elucidates the principles that antiquity and modernity alike must follow, truly a book the world has never seen." Building on the clinical experience of physicians across the ages, Yuan wove in his own insights and devoted the book to the theoretical problems of pattern identification and treatment. It opens with a "General Program for Diagnosis and Treatment," which stresses that diagnosis must rest on prudence and that quick results must not be sought; it holds that the clinician should attend closely to inspection, listening, inquiry, and palpation, distinguish root from branch and exterior from interior, deficiency from excess, and take the seasonal heat and cold into account before fixing a prescription. Later chapters discuss the need to understand yin and yang, deficiency and excess; the need to review seasonal factors when prescribing; the need to examine all four diagnostic methods before identifying a pattern and setting a formula; the need for precise and cautious use of drugs; the stomach as the source of transformation and generation; preserving health to ward off illness; and what one should know when nursing the sick. It then analyzes such conditions as malarial nodules, cough, wind-stroke, edema, consumptive exhaustion, pediatrics, chest and hypochondriac pain with rebellious liver-stomach qi, and warm heat and warm epidemic disease. The book was among the first to advance the ideas that warm pathogens are contracted from above and that they may be transmitted in a reverse or a sequential direction, an insight that helped inspire later warm-disease theory. It circulated originally in manuscript, was later annotated by the Qing scholar Zhao Shuanghu, and was included in the Three-Three Medical Texts. This edition is the volume in Shanxi Science and Technology Press's "Rare Texts of Chinese Medicine: Facsimile and Collation" series that collects the True Transmission of Diagnosis and Treatment, Medical-Stage Pattern Identification, The Subtle Truth of Medicine, and A Medical Sketch from the Pingqin Study; it brings Yuan Ban's work together with Wang Bichang's Medical-Stage Pattern Identification and two other medical works, for study and clinical reference.