Makers › Physician / Medical Master
Zhang Zhongjing
Late Han physician from Nanyang whose Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Disorders survives in the Song editions known as the Shanghan lun and Jingui yaolue
In a dispensary, a tall wooden cabinet of many small drawers stands behind a stone mortar and pestle, with herbs hanging from the beams; a copper scale, a clay pot on a small lit stove and baskets of leaves sit in front, and one person with a basket walks in the herb garden.
Also known as Ming Ji · Yi Sheng
Zhang Ji, better known by his courtesy name Zhongjing, came from Nanyang; no dynastic history gives him a biography. In the preface to his Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Disorders (Shanghan zabing lun) he wrote that his clan of over two hundred had lost two-thirds of its members within ten years after 196, seven in ten of them to cold-damage fevers, and that he gathered old teachings and prescriptions into a work of sixteen juan. The Song editor Lin Yi, citing a lost work called Mingyi lu, said Zhang had been nominated for office and served as governor of Changsha, a claim absent from Han sources and still debated. The text was rearranged by Wang Shuhe in the Western Jin and issued by the Northern Song editorial bureau as the Shanghan lun and the Jingui yaolue. Its six-channel scheme for febrile illness and many of its formulas stayed in use, and later physicians called him the Sage of Medicine.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; late Eastern Han