On Cold Damage

Shanghai San Lian Book Store
2017, March
23.6x16.6x4

Shang Han Lun or Shang Han Za Bin Lun, is the treatise on Cold Disease Damage by Zhang Zhongjing published in 220 AD, the Hippocrates of Traditional Chinese medicine. It is the oldest complete clinical textbook in world medical history, and one of the four most important canonical medical classics which students must study in Chinese medical education.

Shang Han Lun has 397 sections with 112 herbal prescriptions. The discussion is based on the Six Divisions:
TAl YANG (greater yang): a milder stage with external symptoms of chills, fevers, stiffness, and headache. Therapy: sweating
YANG MING (yang brightness): a more severe internal excess yang condition with fever without chills, distended abdomen, and constipation. Therapy: cooling and eliminating
SHAO YANG (lesser yang): half outside, half inside half excess and half deficiency with chest discomfort, alternating chills, and fever. Therapy: harmonizing
TAl YIN (greater yin): chills, distended abdomen with occasional pain. Therapy: warming with supplementing.
SHAO YIN (lesser yin): weak pulse, anxiety, drowsiness, diarrhea, chills, cold extremities. Therapy: warming with supplementing
JUE YIN (absolute yin): thirst, difficult urination, physical collapse. Therapy: warming with supplementing

Zhang Zhongjing, formal name Zhang Ji, was an Eastern Han physician and one of the most eminent Chinese physicians during the later years of the Eastern Han. He established medication principles and summed up the medicinal experience up until that time, thus making a great contribution to the development of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

He learned medicine by studying from his townsfellow Zhang Bozu, assimilating from previous medicinal literature, and collecting many prescriptions elsewhere, finally writing the medical masterpiece "Shanghan Zabing Lun" (lit. "Treatise on Cold Pathogenic and Miscellaneous Diseases"). Shortly after its publication the book was lost during wartime. Due to Zhang's contribution to Traditional Chinese medicine he is often regarded as the sage of Chinese medicine.

Zhang's masterpiece, Shanghan Zabing Lun, was collected by later people and compiled into two books, namely the Shang Han Lun (lit. "On Cold Damage"), which was a discourse on how to treat epidemic infectious diseases causing fevers prevalent during his era, and the other, highly influential doctrine Jinkui Yaolue (lit. "Essential Prescriptions of the Golden Coffer"), a compendium of his clinical experiences. These two texts have been heavily reconstructed several times up to the modern era. Revered for authoring the Shang Han Za Bing Lun, Zhang Zhongjing is considered to have founded the Cold Damage or "Cold Disease" school of Chinese medicine and is widely considered the seminal expert to this day.