Abstract
This is the first of a number of cases in which Xu offers a prognosis of imminent death and does not treat the patient. When a patient died, the family, if not the law, often considered doctors who had treated him responsible; knowing when treatment was bound to fail was therefore a basic medical skill in many cultures. Xu summarizes the signs and symptoms, but presents no diagnosis (as usual in cases where the prognosis was dire). After presenting the case, he provides a brief doctrinal discussion based on the Treatise, and then records that his prognosis was correct; the patient died.
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Notes
- 1.
In the Northern Song there were two Qianming temples, one in present-day Jiangxi and one in Hubei.
- 2.
Yin Toxicity 陰毒 is a disorder first recorded in the Jinkui yaolue (金匱要略•百合狐惑陰陽毒病脈證治). This disorder arises from injury by cold pathogen, resulting in the flourishing of yang qi and the diminution of yin qi. The main symptoms are cold extremities and a pale face. See Zhongyi da cidian, 2nd ed., p. 741 and Zhang and Unschuld 2015, p. 633.
- 3.
Bian Que was a legendary physician (See, Brown 2015, pp. 41–62). His biography in chapter 105 of Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian has no historical value. There seems to have been a book attributed to him circulating in Xu’s time. The oldest extant source containing a similar reference is Sun Simiao’s Beiji qianjin yaofang, juan 11, p. 167.
- 4.
We know very little about Song Di, who was an official at some point between 1068 and 1077. According to Okanishi 1969 (p. 394), he wrote the lost Manifestations of Yin Toxicity in Mnemonics 陰毒形證訣 about Cold Damage. The same quotation appears in Xu Shuwei’s Shanghan fawei lun: 8. That book quotes Song Di’s textbook a number of times.
Bibliography
Other Sources:
Brown, Miranda. 2015. The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Okanishi, Tameto 岡西為人 1969. Song yiqian yi jikao 宋以前醫籍考 [Studies of medical books through the Song period]. 4 vols. Taibei: Ku T’ing Book House.
Zhang, Zhibin and Paul U. Unschuld, eds. 2015. Dictionary of the Ben cao gang mu, Volume 1: Chinese Historical Illness Terminology. Berkley: University of California Press.
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Goldschmidt, A. (2019). Case Number 25. In: Medical Practice in Twelfth-century China – A Translation of Xu Shuwei’s Ninety Discussions [Cases] on Cold Damage Disorders. Archimedes, vol 54. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06103-6_26
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