The classical shelves

Qicura is built on a hand-checked catalogue of classical Chinese medicine texts. These pages split that catalogue by shelf and show, for each book, what it works on and what it changed - the same records the product reads from.

• Dietary Therapy — 3 titlesThe food-and-kitchen literature: meals framed as daily regulation rather than as a prescription, with the seasonal logic behind them. This is where the dietary advice our product gives in plain language ultimately comes from.
• Clinical Synthesis — 6 titlesGeneralists of the classical field. Each of these attempted something the earlier books did not: hold theory, diagnosis and practice in one work, written from a physician's own accumulated cases rather than from commentary.
• Diagnosis — 6 titlesPulse, tongue, and the ordering of signs. These are the books that make a pattern reading reproducible rather than intuitive: they specify what to look at, in what sequence, and how to name what you found.
• Foundational Theory — 2 titlesThe two books that set the questions everything else argues about: how the body's channels are mapped, why a pulse reading means anything, and what a pattern is before anyone names it. They are read today for the shape of the reasoning, not for the labels.
• Regimen & Longevity — 2 titlesNot medicine for illness but the literature on daily regulation — sleep, food, emotion, season — the part of the tradition closest to what would now be called self-care, and the part most often written for a lay reader.
• Formulary Collections — 6 titlesThe formulary shelf — collections whose value is organisational. They gathered what had been scattered across families and lineages, checked recipes against each other, and in doing so became the record of what a given era actually used.
• Elder Care — 2 titlesThe geriatric shelves. Written when old age was a medical category of its own: what to watch, what to ease, and where these writers explicitly stopped short of promising.
• Pediatrics — 3 titlesA tradition that had to reason about patients who could not describe anything. These books are unusually concrete for their era: what to look at on a child who cannot answer, and how to act when the answer is not coming.
• Gynecology — 2 titlesConditions specific to women in the classical record — pregnancy, birth, menstruation — written at a time when a physician's notes were often the only surviving account of what happened to a patient.
• Materia Medica — 2 titlesSubstance catalogues: hundreds of entries of what this is called, where it grows, how it is graded, and what it is traditionally said to do. Every later materia medica, and every formula in this corpus, is assembled out of entries like these.
• Acupuncture & Tuina — 2 titlesPoint-based practice: where the points are, how they were located on the body, and what the texts say about using them. Our own product deliberately stops at self-massage and says so on every page.
• Warm Disease & Epidemics — 4 titlesWritten in centuries of epidemics. These four books are where the tradition separated 'warm disease' from 'cold damage' and started describing fever by stages of depth — the reasoning behind how a febrile illness is watched day by day.
• Cold-Damage & Externals — 2 titlesThe clinical line that answers a very practical question — what do I look at first when someone is acutely unwell. Its lasting contribution is a way of recording a case so that the next reader can check the order of the signs.
• Spleen-Stomach & Internal — 1 titlesOne short treatise that turned the question around: instead of what came in from outside, what happens when the body's own centre of digestion and support is worn down. It is the ancestor of every 'strengthen the middle' line of thinking.
• Etiology — 1 titlesA court-commissioned catalogue of causes — the earliest attempt to write down, for each symptom, what disorder could be behind it, without prescribing. As a diagnostic checklist it is closer to a modern symptom index than to a formulary.

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