The house journal
医话
The journal is where we write at length. Three or four essays a year, written by the same physicians who write the readings, 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
What this is
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.
Our grandfather opened the clinic in 1987 and wrote his notes by hand in ruled exercise books, one for each year. Several of the arguments in these essays come out of those books, including the pot at the back of the winter stove and the forty years of telling people to soak their feet. The English is ours. The observations are older than we are.
Four rules, and we would like to be held to them.
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
The physicians of Bencao House, a family practice licensed in China and working since 1987. We publish under the house name rather than an individual byline, because the readings are written the same way: whoever is at the desk that week writes, and the house stands behind every line.
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.
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
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.