Who writes the journal?
Bencao House. Essays go out under the house name rather than an individual byline, and the house stands behind every line. Readings are different: each one is signed by the physician who wrote it.
The house journal
Journal
医话
- Essays
- 3
- Written by
- Bencao House
- Price
- Free to read
The journal is where we write at length. Three or four essays a year, on the things thirty questions cannot cover: the shape of a broken night, what a Chinese kitchen changes in late summer, why the middle of the body gets so much attention. Sourced, dated, and free to read.
The essays
Everything published so far
What this is
An old Chinese genre, kept
医话 — yī huà, physician’s talks — is a real Chinese literary form, and an old one. A working doctor keeps a notebook: a case that went strangely, a line from the canon that turned out to mean something different in practice, an argument with a colleague, the food a household in one particular street eats in August. It is not a textbook and it is not a case record. It is the thinking that sits between them, written down before it is lost.
We have kept the form because it fits what we do. A reading is a private document written for one person, and it has to stay short. The journal is where the reasoning behind those documents can be laid out properly, with the sources named, the dates given and the weak parts admitted to. If an idea in this tradition is two thousand years old but has never been shown to be a mechanism, we would rather say so in an essay than quietly leave the impression uncorrected in a report.
The house standard
Four rules, and we would like to be held to them.
- Every claim carries its source. Book, author, date, and where in the book. Not “ancient texts”.
- Every Chinese term is glossed in English the first time it appears. Characters are here as citation, not as decoration that means nothing to the reader.
- Where the tradition is a metaphor, we say so. The organ clock, the fire under the pot, the vat in the middle of the body — these are descriptive schemes built from bedside observation. We use them because they organise what people report, and we do not present them as physiology.
- Every essay says where it stops. There is a marked paragraph near the end of each one listing what belongs with a clinician licensed where you live, in person, this week.
Huangdi Neijing, SuwenThe Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor: Plain Questionsc. 200 BCE
The sage attends to what has not yet become illness, rather than to what already has; and puts things in order before they are disordered.
Questions
About the journal
How often does a new essay appear?
Three or four times a year. We would rather publish an essay we have finished arguing with than keep to a schedule, and a piece usually sits for a month between the first draft and the page.
Do I have to buy anything to read it?
No. The journal, the patterns and the food pages are free, and there is no email address to hand over first. The only thing we sell is a written reading, US $39, delivered as a PDF within 48 hours.
The reading
The essays are general. A reading is not.
Everything on this page is written for everybody, which is another way of saying it is written for nobody in particular. A reading is the opposite: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a document written in English for you alone by a physician licensed in China, sent within 48 hours.