bubble_chart Description Fang You-zhi authored. It consists of eight volumes, with an additional volume of materia medica notes, a volume of Questions and Answers, and a volume of Treatise on Convulsions. The Treatise on Cold-Damage Diseases was reorganized, with the most significant changes in the Taiyang (EX-HN5) section, structured around wind damaging the defense, cold damaging the nutrient, and wind-cold damaging the nutrient-defense as the main themes.
Fang You-zhi abandoned Confucianism to pursue medicine, starting from repeatedly reading and earnestly studying the great medical master Zhang Zhong-jing's monumental work on Treatise on Cold-Damage Diseases. In Chinese medicine, cold-damage diseases refer to all acute diseases caused by external pathogens (broadly), or specifically to symptoms such as fever, aversion to cold, absence of sweating, headache, and painful stiff neck (narrowly), which differ from the cold-damage diseases as understood in Western medicine. The Systematic Differentiation of Cold-Damage Diseases consists of 8 volumes, first summarized with diagrams, removing the falsely attributed "Examples of Cold-Damage Diseases" by Wang Shu-he, and then reorganizing the treatment of cold-damage diseases and miscellaneous diseases according to the six-meridian system into 11 chapters, 22 sections, 397 articles, and 113 prescriptions. Fang You-zhi in this compilation advocated the "Three Outlines" theory of "wind damaging the defense," "cold damaging the nutrient," and "wind-cold damaging the nutrient-defense," which had a significant impact in the medical field, initiating a new trend in the study of Treatise on Cold-Damage Diseases. Upon its publication, it garnered widespread support, first from the great medical master Yu Chang of Jiangxi, who believed that Fang You-zhi "possessed unique insights, unprecedented in ancient times." Subsequently, Wu Yi-luo from Haiyan, Cheng Yingmao from She County, and others expressed their support, forming a "trend of textual criticism," establishing a "school of textual criticism" in the study of Treatise on Cold-Damage Diseases, known as the "Textual Criticism School." There was also the opposing "Maintenance of the Original Text School" and the "School of Differentiation," which neither supported textual criticism nor agreed with conservatism.
The Systematic Differentiation of Cold-Damage Diseases stirred up a great controversy in the field of
Treatise on Cold-Damage Diseases research, promoting the rise of different schools within the medical community and creating a situation of a hundred schools of thought contending, which played a significant role in advancing the development of Chinese medicine.