Diagnosis — the 6 books the tradition kept on this shelf
Pulse, 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.
Every entry below is taken from the same catalogue the product is built on: the title, the hand behind it, when it sits in time, what the book works on, and what it changed. Sentences in bold are the ones we can point an outside source at; the rest is our summary of the book, not a claim from it.
The Pulse Classic (脉经)
晋·王叔和 · Jin (280) · Mai Jing
Works on: Its subject is what the vessels feel like under three fingers, and its ambition is standardisation. The opening juan fixes twenty-four pulse images, each with a one-line definition — floating: full at light touch, failing at deep pressure; sinking: only found on heavy pressing — and follows them with a table of which images are easily mistaken for which. Later juan run the same descriptions against the wrist sections, against the organs, against the twelve channels, against therapeutic prohibitions, and finally against women and children.
What it changed: What survived first was the vocabulary: physicians after Wang Shuhe argued about pulses in his terms, and a later re-examination — the Binhu Mai Xue — worked by taking his list and correcting it image by image. What survived second was a limit. Right at the front the book insists that taking the pulse must be paired with looking at the eyes and at complexion; the fingers are one channel of four, and not a verdict on their own. It pinned what the fingers cannot describe into twenty-four standard pulse types — the first systematic work on pulse — and Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese medicine still uses its names.
Binhu's Pulse Studies (濒湖脉学)
明·李时珍 · Ming (1564) · Bin Hu Mai Xue
Works on: Written to replace a bad textbook. A spurious Song verse primer on pulses had become what students recited and what older physicians grew grey without ever understanding, so Li Shizhen condensed his father's diagnostic writings into a substitute. Twenty-seven pulse images, one block each: what it feels like, which image it masquerades as, what it tends to mean — all in verse you can carry about in your head.
What it changed: The unit is a single pulse with fixed sub-headings, so a reader can query one image without reading the book straight through, and check one line against the text it is correcting. Four short dissertations follow, arguing that the celebrated verse primer was never Wang Shuhe's and that the old seven-exterior, eight-interior, nine-channel count is simply wrong. Unusually for a pulse manual, the preface demotes its own subject: pulses are the last of the four examinations, and none of the other three may be skipped. It turned pulse doctrine into seven-character rhymes, one per pulse, memorisable on the spot — still recited by beginners in Chinese medicine and Japanese Kampo alike.
Tongue Mirror of Cold-Damage (伤寒舌鉴)
清·张登 · Qing (1668) · Shang Han She Jian
Works on: A tongue atlas grouped by coating colour: white, yellow, black, grey, red, purple, mould-and-sauce, blue, with tongues seen in pregnancy during cold damage appended — nine groups in all. Each opens with an essay explaining why that colour behaves as it does, then numbered plates, one paragraph per plate: the look of the tongue, which channel it puts the illness in, outside or inside, whether sweating or purging is still available, and whether the case is already lost. Blunt verdicts sit inside the entries. The old question — how many days has this cold been travelling — is replaced by: what is on the tongue now.
What it changed: It made reading a tongue a record with fields: the colour family, then place — tip, centre, root, edges, heart — moisture and density, the channel and whether it sits outside or inside, the direction of treatment and whether it can be treated; entries run in numbered order and the essays give the reason for each class. Rarer still is its stated edit: earlier books had grown from thirty-six plates to one hundred and thirty-seven, and it cut them back by its own experience, because a tongue tests more easily than a pulse.
Canon of Inspection Diagnosis (望诊遵经)
清·汪宏 · Qing (1861) · Wang Zhen Zun Jing
Works on: Inspection laid out as a checklist, then filled in box by box. First the frame: facial regions mapped to organs, six divisions fixing inside against outside, five colours answering to five organs, and ten paired gauges for how a colour sits and reads — floating and sunk, clear and turbid, faint and intense, scattered and gathered, glossy and withered. Then through eyes, tongue, mouth and lips, teeth, nose and ears, beard and hair, head and face, body, abdomen and back, hands and feet, skin, flesh, sinew, bone and nails, on to sweat, blood, phlegm, stool, urine and menstruation, ending with posture, movement and bearing. The headings themselves say which level you are reading.
What it changed: Its most reusable part is ten paired scales: colour is never a conclusion by itself but is read against floating and sinking, clear and turbid, slight and severe, scattered and gathered, glossy and withered. It also wrote the conditions of observation into the method — examine at dawn, let the colour-reading wait until all is still. Teaching materials on inspection in Japan and Korea still work through the face in the order it set out.
Differentiating by the Tongue Mirror (舌鉴辨证)
清·王文选 · Qing (18th c.) · She Jian Bian Zheng
Works on: One plate per entry, numbered 001 through 149, grouped under colour essays beginning with white and yellow. First comes a map laying the tongue's regions onto the organs: root for kidney and bowel, left and right of the middle for stomach and spleen, tip for the heart, the two edges for liver and gallbladder, with tip, middle and root answering to the three burners. Then fourteen opening rules say what has been changed — do not take the drawings literally, drop the generation-and-conquest verdicts on colour, ignore fixed day-counts, and stop reading the tongue only for cold damage.
What it changed: Two things survive. It gave the tongue a map: beside colour, "which part" — the same shade at the tip, the centre, the root reads differently. And it set an order of evidence: in long or serious illness "the pulse may not be trusted; then trust the tongue", because the pulse lies under skin and the tongue does not. It also dropped the old five-colour death predictions and kept only what could be looked at — which is why another medical tradition could later pick the method up whole.
Ao's Golden Mirror of Cold-Damage Tongue (敖氏伤寒金镜录)
元·杜清碧 编次 · Yuan (14th c.) · Ao Shi Shang Han Jin Jing Lu
Works on: Reads cold-damage off the tongue — colour and coating standing for heat, cold, excess, deficiency and how the illness is turning — then matches a treatment. The preface is blunt: cold-damage turns unpredictably and pulse reading is hard to hold steady.
What it changed: Several sources call it the earliest surviving dedicated text on tongue diagnosis and the founding work of that method. The plainer claim is stronger: it turned tongue-looking into a classified, look-up-able instrument rather than individual feel. It is generally held to be the earliest surviving book in the world devoted to tongue diagnosis — turning a feel in the practitioner's eye into something you can look up.
Where this leaves our product
Qicura reads a described symptom against this kind of material and returns a pattern in plain language with the sources named. It does not dispense: no herb quantities, no formula composition, no preparation instructions, and no needling technique - those are deliberate limits enforced on the server, not wording we soften for a page.
Educational, self-care content - not a medical diagnosis. For personal advice, consult a qualified practitioner.