The Famous Qing Physician Wang Qingren and His Medical Errors Corrected (Part 1)

Among the famous TCM classics of the ages, my favorite is not the Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon) or Shanghan Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage), which most people venerate as classics, but the Yilin Gaicuo (Corrections of Errors in Medicine), which many people do not know. Professor Jiang Chunhua said that classics such as the Huangdi Neijing and Nanjing (Classic of Issues) "do contain contradictions, but earlier scholars always strained to explain them and reconcile the contradictions, and thus, hard pressed, could not make themselves consistent. For two thousand years no one could point out what was right or wrong; even those who doubted dared not say so openly, until Wang bravely and explicitly did so."

Professor Jiang Chunhua's appraisal of Wang Qingren is very apt. In a TCM world accustomed to conformity for over two thousand years, Wang Qingren was an extremely rare outsider who dared to use evidence to refute the classics—the Huangdi Neijing, the Nanjing, and the Shanghan Lun—that most TCM practitioners worship. And although some of his criticisms contained errors, the great majority were correct.

He corrected many mistaken concepts in TCM, which is why he titled his own slim work Yilin Gaicuo (Corrections of Errors in the Forest of Medicine). Beyond the eight-principle pattern differentiation of yin-yang, exterior-interior, deficiency-excess, and cold-heat that traditional TCM valued, Wang Qingren opened up the concept of "qi and blood," which influenced not only TCM but also Western medicine. His research on blood-stasis patterns, in particular, still has very practical clinical value today. The 33 prescriptions Wang Qingren created for treating diseases of the nervous system, vascular diseases, and tumors have distinctive efficacy.

Mr. Shi Jinmo, one of the late Four Great Physicians of Beijing, proposed expanding TCM's eight-principle differentiation to ten principles; the two added principles were precisely qi and blood, and Mr. Shi was influenced by Wang Qingren. Wang Qingren's Yilin Gaicuo was completed in the Gengyin year of the Daoguang reign (1830) and was the only book he published in his lifetime. It is short and incisive; a fast reader can finish it in two or three hours. Since its publication, Wang's work has been enormously popular. From the first printing by the Sanhuai Tang bookshop in Beijing in 1830 to the fall of the Qing Dynasty eighty years later, scattered editions numbered more than forty; to this day, no fewer than seventy editions can be found within China.

Moreover, soon after it appeared, the book was translated into French, English, Japanese, and other languages. Its earliest English translation was even published in Britain's Transactions of the Royal Academy, and European science called Wang Qingren a "modern anatomist." Wang Qingren's greatest contribution was that, through firsthand observation of human internal organs, he pointed out the errors in the understanding of the organs contained in the various TCM works over two millennia. It was, one might say, a head-on wake-up call for those who superstitiously venerate the Huangdi Neijing and Nanjing.

During the Xianfeng reign of the Qing, Zhang Run had a friend whose son fell ill. The TCM physicians of the time judged the child to have suffered a stroke, so, according to traditional TCM theory, they treated him with various wind-dispelling herbs. After taking the medicine, the child's limbs convulsed and his mouth and eye slanted, and his life hung by a thread. "Suddenly a fine formula was obtained; one dose brought slight improvement, and three doses cured him completely." (Suddenly he obtained a prescription; after one dose he improved, and after three he recovered.) Zhang Run was greatly amazed. He then learned of another patient who had suffered hemiplegia for over ten years, who likewise, after obtaining a fine formula, could walk as before. Curious about these formulas, Zhang Run traced their source in detail and found that both came from Wang Qingren's Yilin Gaicuo. This event moved him deeply, and he did not hesitate to donate funds to have Yilin Gaicuo printed.

Here I would like to tell a joke about myself. Once a TCM enthusiast who resented my writings came to debate with me, insisting that the Huangdi Neijing was beyond question. At the time a Daoist priest named Zhang Zhishun was being hyped online as very famous; this TCM enthusiast cited Priest Zhang as a model of someone who had perfectly combined Daoist philosophy with TCM.

I happened to know a little about Priest Zhang, so I suggested that the enthusiast look through Priest Zhang's various interviews to find out which medical classic the priest most admired. He later told me it was Yilin Gaicuo—which I had known all along; I deliberately had him go look. Then I suggested he spend ten or fifteen minutes looking through Yilin Gaicuo, even just the beginning—the free electronic version is everywhere. After reading it, he was speechless. He will probably never again cite Priest Zhang Zhishun to defend his slavish devotion to the Huangdi Neijing. Of course, in the last two years he has finally woken up and stopped studying TCM with a superstitious attitude; I personally feel his transformation has something to do with Wang Qingren's Yilin Gaicuo.

Priest Zhang, now over a hundred, knows how to navigate human relations. He is deeply aware that the Chinese tradition of conformity runs deep; he does not wish to argue with the stubborn, but he also will not tell lies. So he recommends that others study Yilin Gaicuo himself, while not making remarks about the TCM classics that would discomfort die-hard Huangdi Neijing fans. Once readers open Yilin Gaicuo, they will see abundant content refuting the TCM classics on the basis of fact, and so Priest Zhang need not himself criticize those revered classics. As far as I know, in his early years Priest Zhang Zhishun treated cirrhosis and cancer, with some efficacy, using formulas drawn mainly from Yilin Gaicuo.

Recently the daughter of a patient with leukemia and a brain tumor came to consult me. After her mother developed cancer, she treated her mother using TCM knowledge she had taught herself, maintaining her mother's high quality of life for many years. But she lacked confidence in her own TCM foundation; honored that she thought highly of me, she was willing to pay for consultations on points she did not understand. In treating her mother, she mainly used Wang Qingren's Buyang Huanwu Tang (Yang-Supplementing Five-Returning Decoction) and similar formulas, with results far better than the prescriptions written by the TCM physicians she had consulted.

I have long wanted to set aside a large block of time to write some annotations to Yilin Gaicuo. Though I cannot entirely agree with Wang Qingren's critique of the TCM classics, I deeply agree with most of his views. I also frequently use prescriptions from Yilin Gaicuo in treating illness, and these formulas work very well.

Medicine is a practical science. The reason a small book like Wang Qingren's Yilin Gaicuo has found such favor is that Wang's work is highly practical. Some of Wang Qingren's well-known formulas—such as Xuefu Zhuyu Tang (Blood Mansion Stasis-Expelling Decoction), Tongqiao Zhuyu Tang (Orifice-Opening Stasis-Expelling Decoction), Gexia Zhuyu Tang (Diaphragm-Below Stasis-Expelling Decoction), Shentong Zhuyu Tang (Body-Pain Stasis-Expelling Decoction), and Buyang Huanwu Tang—are already widely known, and most textbooks on formulaology include them.

Today, a TCM physician who does not know who Wang Qingren is, or who does not know some of his classic formulas, is arguably unqualified. Even if they do not read the original Yilin Gaicuo, they will encounter its prescriptions in many TCM books and in the case records of famous physicians. Most Western physicians are in fact unwittingly using Wang Qingren's treatment methods, or dispensing patent medicines based on his formulas such as Xuefu Zhuyu Wan (pills) or capsules—they simply do not know where the medicine came from. The thrombolytic therapy that modern Western medicine uses for cerebral thrombosis and many other vascular diseases is connected to Wang Qingren.

I plan to write a series of articles introducing this rare TCM innovator and his work. I have already written several articles introducing a few of his formulas, but I feel it necessary to give a comprehensive introduction to Wang Qingren's scholarly thought and clinical experience, for the reference of readers.

Let this article serve as an opening.