Jin Gui Yao Lue: Essential Prescriptions of the Golden Cabinet, Translation & Commentaries

expensive but necessary if you're studying the classics of Chinese medicine

Great item and seller, Thanks very much.

Great book for Tcm students or existing practitioners..

great company, very satisfied.

I am a practicing clinician of Chinese medicine as well as a historian finishing a PhD in Chinese medical history at Columbia University. My specialty, both as a clinician and a historian is the work of Zhang Zhongjing. No translation of books this old is going to be perfect, but this one is not only the best available, it is also a sound and useful translation.A previous reviewer recommended Understanding the Jin Gui Yao Lue: A Comprehensive Textbook as a better translation. I cannot agree. The quality of that translation is poorer and less reliable. Moreover, the author has rearranged the lines of the text within each chapter according to what the author thought was a more logical order. Doing so prevents a student from seeing the flow of ideas in the original text and in some cases causes great difficulties for interpretation. Wiseman's translation keeps the original order of the text.Too often students of Chinese medicine think translation is a simple procedure of replacing Chinese words with English words. It is in fact a very difficult process that is always less than satisfactory. If you are serious about learning what Zhongjing has to say about medicine, you need to also take seriously the difficulties involved in translation. If you do not, you will fail to appreciate the subtleties of a text like this--subtleties that are essential for good clinical practice. Wiseman's emphasis on the methodology of translation is not only a reflection of his personal interests (he is a linguist after all), but also of the realities of working with a text this difficult.To sum up, if you're not going to learn Chinese (the best way to read this text), then this is the translation you should use. Wiseman's work has the advantage of being methodical and open and how and why he translates the way hie does. He stays close to the original text and that allows a student to see more of what the original text says on its own terms--and that's essential for any real understanding of this important text.

I was waiting for this book for 4 years! I thought it would never come out! I was expecting it to be of the same caliber of the sister book "Shang Han Lun" by Ye, Wiseman, Mitchell. I was totally dissapointed. If you want to buy this book to gain insight on ZhangZhongJing way of perscribing herb and be clinically useful, this is not the book for you. If you wanted a textbook, technical translation, this is the book for you. But then again, there are better book than this one like "Understading the Jin Gui Yao Lue: A Comprehensive Textbook". At least on that book, there are commentary on practical cases and also historical commentary useful in a clinical practice.The only thing that this book offer that is not on the other books out there, is the pinyin pronounciation of the chinese text. There are some annoying things when you read this book, like mixing traditional and simplified script (even a word where one character is traditional and the next character simplified group together for the word!). Some of the herbs are translated wrong like astragalus for huang qin! There are even wrong original chinese text in the book like on the section Female Malaria, the chinese word used was for Male Malaria!I expect more from the editor since this is supposed to have been finished in 2005!Again, don't buy this book, you will be very dissapointed!