Zhang Zhongjing is associated with the tradition of the Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases. Later transmission and editing produced important classics including the Treatise on Cold Damage and Essential Prescriptions of the Golden Cabinet. The versions read today passed through centuries of copying and editing; they are not direct preservation of the author's manuscript. This is itself a subject for the history of medical texts.
Historical background
Zhang Zhongjing, formal name Zhang Ji, was a Chinese pharmacologist, physician, inventor, and writer of the Eastern Han dynasty and one of the most eminent Chinese physicians during the later years of the Han dynasty. He established medication principles and summed up the medicinal experience until that time, thus making a considerable contribution to the development of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Though well known in modern Chinese medicine and considered one of the finest Chinese physicians in history, very little is known about his life. According to later sources, he was born in Nanyang, held an official position in Changsha and lived from approximately 150 to 219 AD. Exact dates regarding his birth, death and works vary, but an upper limit of 220 AD is generally accepted.
During his time, with warlords fighting for their own territories, many people fell victim to infectious diseases. Zhang's family was no exception. He learned medicine by studying from his towns fellow and later teacher Zhang Bozu, assimilating from previous medicinal literature such as Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic Huangdi Neijing, and collecting many prescriptions elsewhere, finally writing the medical masterpiece Shanghan Zabing Lun. Shortly after its publication, the book was lost during the wars that ravaged China during the period of the Three Kingdoms. Because of Zhang's contribution to traditional Chinese medicine, he is often regarded as the sage of Chinese medicine.
Zhang's masterpiece, Shanghan Zabing Lun, was collected and organised later by physicians, notably Wang Shuhe from the Jin Dynasty and various court physicians during the Song dynasty into two books, namely for the former, the Shang Han Lun (lit. "On Cold Damage"), which was mainly on a discourse on how to treat epidemic infectious diseases causing fevers prevalent during his era, and the latter, the Jingui Yaolüe (lit. "Essential Prescriptions of the Golden Coffer"), a compendium of various clinical experiences which was regarded as a main discourse on internal diseases. These two texts have been heavily reconstructed several times up to the modern era.
Revered for authoring the Shāng Hán Zá Bìng Lùn, Zhang Zhongjing is considered to have founded the Cold Damage or "Cold Disease" school of Chinese medicine and is widely considered the seminal expert to this day.
Influence
Zhang's later reputation also shows how authorship can become a form of authority within a medical tradition. His name is associated with an influential body of writing, while the surviving books also reflect the work of later collectors and editors. These two aspects should be kept together. Recognizing the author's importance does not mean treating the received versions as untouched copies of his own manuscript. The texts are sources for studying the development and transmission of medical knowledge, including the decisions that preserved some material and reorganized it into separate works.
The Shanghan Lun, variously known in English as the Treatise on Cold Damage Diseases, Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders or the Treatise on Cold Injury is a part of Shanghan Zabing Lun. It is a Traditional Chinese medicine treatise that was compiled by Zhang Zhongjing sometime before 220 AD, at the end of the Han dynasty. It is amongst the oldest complete clinical textbooks in the world (cf. Carakasaṃhitā and the Hippocratic Corpus). It is considered one of the four canonical works of Traditional Chinese and Japanese medicine, along with Huang Di Nei Jing, Jin Gui Yao Lue, and Wen Bing Xue.