Wang Qingren

Also known as Zi Xunchen · Yu Tianren

Wang Qingren, courtesy name Xunchen, came from Yutian in Zhili; he held a military licentiate, bought an official title and practised medicine in Beijing. He believed that the organ diagrams in older medical books were often wrong, and that treating illness without knowing the organs was like a blind man walking at night. In 1797, during an epidemic among children at Daodi in Luanzhou, he spent ten days examining more than thirty bodies that dogs had dug from shallow paupers' graves, and later he watched at execution grounds in Mukden and Beijing and questioned an officer about the position of the diaphragm. In 1830 he published Correcting the Errors of Medicine (Yilin gaicuo) with revised organ charts and formulas for moving stagnant blood, among them the Xuefu zhuyu and Buyang huanwu decoctions. He died in Beijing the next year. The late Qing physician Lu Maoxiu mocked him for learning medicine among corpses, while the Draft History of Qing records his first-hand observations.