Zhang Zhongjing: the Sage of Chinese Medicine. (PHOTO:VCG)

By BI Weizi

Eminent Chinese pharmacologist and physician, Zhang Zhongjing (150–219), was born in Nanyang, Henan province in the late Eastern Han Dynasty. He was hailed as the sage of Chinese medicine by later generations for his unsurpassed contributions to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).

Using previous medicinal literature such as Huangdi Neijing or Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic, collecting a wide range of medical prescriptions, and drawing on his own practical experience, Zhang wrote the legendary masterpiece Shanghan Zabing Lun or Treatise on Cold Pathogenic and Miscellaneous Diseases. It established the principle of "evidence-based treatment", which is the basic clinical principle and soul of TCM.

Evidence-based treatment is the process of applying theory, method, prescription and medicine to clinical practice. It includes two processes: the method of diagnosis and the determination of treatment based on the differentiation of symptoms and signs. Diagnosis is identifying a disease by physicians through the four diagnostic methods (inspection, auscultation and olfaction, inquiry and palpation) and eight principles (yin and yang, exterior and interior, cold and heat, deficiency and excess). This theory of treatment is to determine the corresponding treatment method according to the results of the identification.

However, shortly after the book was published, it was lost in the wars of the time. The version that people see today was collated by later physicians into two books, namely, Shang Han Lun (On Cold Damage) and Jingui Yaolue (Essential Prescriptions of the Golden Coffer). The former mainly focused on a discourse on how to treat epidemic infectious diseases causing fevers prevalent during his era, and the latter was devoted to treatments on internal diseases.

The book spread overseas and was also highly respected in foreign medical circles, becoming an important textbook for study. Statistically, from the Jin Dynasty (266-420) to the present, more than a thousand Chinese and foreign scholars have compiled, annotated and studied Shanghan Zabing Lun. In addition, the development of medicine in  Korea,  Vietnam,  Indonesia,  Singapore, Mongolia and other countries have also been promoted to varying degrees.