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Chao Yuanfang
Sui court physician who led the compilation of the fifty-chapter Treatise on the Origins and Symptoms of Diseases under Emperor Yang
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 Sui Tai Yi Bo Shi
Chao Yuanfang was a Sui court physician whose life the official histories do not record, and even his home region is uncertain. As an erudite of the imperial medical office under Emperor Yang he was ordered to compile the Treatise on the Origins and Symptoms of Diseases (Zhubing yuanhou lun) in fifty chapters, usually dated to 610. Its sixty-seven sections discuss more than 1,700 disorders by cause, course and symptoms; it gives no prescriptions, appending only breathing and movement exercises as treatment. The Tang histories list the book under the name Wu Jingxian as well, but the edition collated and printed by the Northern Song court in the Tiansheng era carried Chao's name, and all later copies descend from it. A Song tale, the Record of Opening the Canal (Kaihe ji), has him curing the canal commissioner Ma Shumou, but this is fiction.
Life and times
Dates Dates unknown; Daye era of Sui