Miao Xiyong
Miao Xiyong (
Career
Born to an affluent family in Changshu,[2] Miao did not sit for any imperial examinations and purportedly began learning medicine on his own from the age of seventeen.[3] Unlike his fellow physicians, who usually worked in a shop and dispensed their own prescriptions, Miao was a wandering physician who did not carry any medicine with him.[4] He would not hesitate to travel to distant locations on horseback.[1] Most of his clients tended to be in the upper-class and could readily access the expensive ingredients that Miao would prescribe by hand.[4] One of Miao's patients had to endure a year-long regimen of abdominal pain medication, or a total of six hundred doses, before he was cured.[5]
Miao was known for his preference for "cold and cooling drugs", such as the gypsum that he used to cure a pregnant woman of her fever.[6] However, he also prescribed "warm-natured" drugs on occasion. For instance, he made a patient consume large amounts of ginseng to alleviate his belching.[6]
Miao spent most of his final years in the county of
Writings
In 1611, Ding Yuanjian (1560–1625), a former official and Miao's friend of thirty years, began compiling a collection of "efficacious medical recipes" that Miao had prescribed. Among the prescriptions discussed in the Xianxingzhai biji (先醒斋笔记) or Notes from the Studio of Early Enlightenment is a decoction containing a virgin boy's urine mixed with various herbs that Miao had used to treat Ding himself in 1615, when he suffered a minor stroke.[10]
A revised edition, titled Xianxingzhai guangbiji (先醒斋广笔记) or Expanded Notes from the Studio of Early Enlightenment, lists Miao as the primary author and contains his commentary alongside Ding's original notes.[11] It was first published in 1622, in response to the overwhelming demand for the earlier Xianxingzhi biji that had ostensibly gone out of stock by 1621.[12] A further revised edition of the text (and the only extant version today) was published by one of Miao's earliest students, Li Zhi , in 1642.[12]
Appearance
Miao was an "eccentric gentleman" who had "electrifying eyes and protruding whiskers".[13] According to his contemporary Qian Qianyi:[13]
He thinks deeply and observes attentively, as if deep in Chan meditation; now he closes his eyes and falls into hypnosis, and in the next moment he rises with full force, lifting his beard and rolling up sleeves, and proceeds to write a prescription and put together some medicines. He takes command and oversees things, and ideas just spring out from his fingers.
References
Citations
Cited works
- Bian, He (2017). "Documenting Medications: Patients' Demand, Physicians' Virtuosity, and Genre-Mixing of Prescription-Cases (Fang'an) in Seventeenth-Century China". Early Science and Medicine. 22 (1): 103–123. PMID 29781591.
- Bian, He (2020). Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691179049.