Miao Xiyong

Miao Xiyong (Chinese: 繆希雍; pinyin: Miào Xīyōng; 1546–1627) was a Chinese physician active during the Ming dynasty.

Career

Born to an affluent family in Changshu,^[1] Miao did not sit for any examinations and purportedly began learning medicine on his own from the age of seventeen.^[2] Unlike his fellow physicians, who usually worked in a shop and dispensed their own prescriptions, Miao was a wandering physician who did not "bring a bag of medicine in his sojourns".^[3] Most of his clients tended to be in the upper-class and could readily access the expensive ingredients that Miao would prescribe by hand.^[3] 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.^[4]

Writings

In 1611, Ding Yuanjian (丁元薦; 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 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.^[5] A revised edition, titled Xianxingzhai guangbiji or Expanded Notes from the Studio of Early Enlightenment, lists Miao as the primary author and contains his commentary alongside Ding's original notes.^[6] 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.^[7] A further revised edition of the text (and its only extant edition) was published by one of Miao's earliest students, Li Zhi (李枝), in 1642.^[7]

Appearance

References

Citations

Cited works