Essential Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold Pieces
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A physician opens the largest medical compendium of its age with a chapter on the practitioner's obligations, insisting that a doctor treat rich and poor identically and calculate no advantage from illness.
- a stated ethical obligation to treat all patients alike
- gynaecology and paediatrics placed first as a matter of priority
- dietary treatments recorded that later proved specifically effective
- emergency and everyday practice given equal weight with theory
The work runs to thirty volumes covering gynaecology and paediatrics first, which was itself an argument about priority, then disorders by system, diet, acupuncture and emergency treatment. It records the treatment of night blindness with animal liver and of goitre with seaweed and thyroid tissue, both effective for reasons unavailable at the time. The opening essay on the great physician's absolute sincerity became the classic statement of Chinese medical ethics and is still cited as such.
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