The Ge xianweng zhouhou beiji fang 葛仙翁肘後備急方, or Transcendent Master Ge’s Emergency-Preparedness Recipes to Keep Close at Hand, is a collection of hundreds of recipes assembled by the scholar-official, and alchemist Ge Hong 葛洪 (283-343). It is the most influential and largest surviving collection of medical recipes for emergency care and critical or acute diseases among Six Dynasty Daoist texts. Compiled by the author Ge Hong 葛洪, who was well-known for his other writings on transcendence and external alchemy, it is considered emblematic of the relationship between Daoism and Chinese medicine. It contains the earliest mention of “foot qi” zuqi 足氣, an important disease in medieval medical works (not to be confused with the modern term); the earliest description of smallpox in the world (wendu faban dayi 温毒發斑大疫), and more recently served as the inspiration to China’s first Nobel Laureate, Tu Youyou 屠呦呦in her work of successfully extracting the anti-malarial substance artemenisin (qinghaosu 青蒿素) from the plant qinghao 青蒿 (Artemisia annua L.).
This transcription comes from the Daoist Canon DZ1306 Hanfenlou 涵芬楼 edition, was transcribed by Monica Esposito’s project and is hosted on the the Kanripo website at https://www.kanripo.org/text/KR5g0115/, which is managed by Christofer Wittern. The source files are located on Github at https://github.com/kanripo/KR5g0115. The Kanripo files were first marked up in MARKUS for drug terms, disease names and related vocabulary by Chang Chao-jan and Wu Ruei-Ming of Fu-jen University, and then was reviewed, edited and converted into DocuSky format by Xu Duoduo 許多多of Nanyang Technological University. The project was supervised by Dr. Michael Stanley-Baker 徐源 of Nanyang Technological University. Initially posted at Nanyang Technological University at https://doi.org/10.21979/N9/JU.