Chapter 124 Medicine, what is medicine?

When Wang Mengying was treating patients everywhere, Hong Xiuquan called. In 1860 AD, when Hangzhou fell, Wang Mengying’s younger brother ran out from the city wall beating a rope in the middle of the night, and finally ran back to Haichang. I don't know how the historians will evaluate the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement in the end. It seems that their political program also includes the idea of ​​​​distributing land to the common people. It should be good, but what I saw from Wang Mengying's medical case is that prices have skyrocketed since then. , Famine was everywhere, and countless people died in flight.

At this time, Haichang also warned several times, and Wang Mengying took his family to live with friends in Puyuan, which is between Jiaxing and Tongxiang.From then on, Wang Mengying began his long-term turbulent life. In the days to come, he would no longer have the concept of home. He would wander around and settle down everywhere. The person who wrote the book is very strange, where is this Suixi residence?Why are you in Puyuan for a while and in Shanghai for a while?In fact, where is there a study, it is a place to sleep. "Suixi" means to rest anywhere. From now on, Wang Mengying's living conditions are very miserable. In the turbulent life, he has to consider the lives of his wife and children while seeing a doctor. However, the patients who see a doctor are also poor people. What about the fee?

Therefore, Wang Mengying often came out of the patient's home hungry. At this time, the price of goods had risen to 8,000 yuan for a stone of rice, and 40 yuan for a catty of pickled vegetables. Wang Mengying wrote in the book: "There is a vast catastrophe, and there is no way to appeal!" Given how impoverished Wang Mengying's family was, how could he afford rice? When he was hungry to see patients, didn't he know how to worry about himself? What kind of doctor is this?Could it be that there is something else in their hearts other than survival? I remember when I was in the second year of my Ph.D., when I came home, one day after dinner, I sat across from my mother and asked my mother, what kind of person was my grandfather?How did he practice medicine?

In the past, I had never asked such questions. In my heart, I always thought that he was an old Chinese doctor in the countryside. He had not received much education and his medical knowledge could never catch up with us. It was only at such an advanced age that I suddenly wanted to know his details, and I asked my mother to tell me the ones she could recall. So my mother began to tell me. She said that her grandfather had to travel over mountains and mountains to go to the patient's home when he was treating a disease. People were very poor at that time. Sometimes after treating the patient's illness, seeing that the patient's home was poor, he would not charge money or eat. Acupuncture package, just go back.

My mother said that once my grandfather was walking on the mountain ridge, he was so hungry that he couldn't support him, so he passed out from hunger, and he didn't know how long he was in a coma there. I woke up again, got up and walked back, and when I got home, I was so hungry that I almost collapsed. "In this case, why bother to treat it?" "Because someone is sick, but you are a doctor." That day, in the evening of that day, at the dinner table after dinner, I listened to the stories of my grandfather through tears, and finally understood in my heart what is the way of medicine. The state of life, a state where even if your life is threatened by death, you still have no scruples to save others.

Wang Mengying has no food to eat at this time, what is he eating?The literature has left records for us that what he ate was bran. Bran is the husk that is peeled off from rice, sometimes some bran is also eaten, and we usually use it as a filling for pillows. Sometimes, the grain is not peeled cleanly, and some broken rice crumbs will be left inside. Wang Mengying used this kind of food to satisfy his hunger, and at the same time, he also took care of other people's illnesses. While seeing a doctor, he "closed the house and endured hunger" at night, and wrote a book. He said that the night was "long and long, and the stomach was boring", so he wrote a book.

What book?It is the most famous book on diet therapy in the history of Chinese medicine, called "Suixiju Diet Spectrum". The book refers to various ancient documents, combined with my own experience in living a well-off life in the past, and lists more than 330 kinds of food that can play a role in health preservation. It is a very valuable book on health preservation and diet therapy. For example, in the category of fruit food, he discussed plums, apricots, peaches, plums, chestnuts, dates, pears, papayas, pomegranates, oranges, kumquats, orange peels, oranges, pomelo, bergamot, loquat, hawthorn, bayberry, The dietary and health effects of 54 foods including cherries, ginkgoes, walnuts, hazelnuts, phoenix seeds, mulberries, lychees, olives, longans, betel nuts, figs, rose apples, watermelons, melons, lotus root, gorgon, lilies, and sugar cane.

I used to think that such a book was written when there were delicacies from mountains and seas in front of me. When I saw that Wang Mengying wrote this book while eating bran and hungry, I felt really uncomfortable. Wang Mengying himself said that he is: "Painting cakes and thinking about plum blossoms, and compiling this manuscript." I can imagine such a scene in my mind, under the bleak moonlight, the children go to bed hungry. The thin Wang Mengying looked at the leftover bran on the table, feeling sour for a while. However, he still picked up a pen to write down the medicinal value of those delicious foods.

He obviously didn't write this book for himself. It is written for future generations, who can eat all kinds of delicacies from mountains and seas, us.