Sun simiao medical ethics
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Sun Simiao (581-682) was a great medical scientist of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907). His native place was Jingzhao Huayuan (now Sunjiayuan in Hui County, Shaanxi Province).
Sun Simiao's viewpoint on medical ethics was very important in the history of Chinese medicine. In hisQianjin Yaofang(Essential Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold), he put forward the notion of "good faith of a great doctor" for the first time, offering an all-round argumentation on the guiding rules of medical ethics a doctor must hold to. "Human life is of paramount importance,more precious than a thousand pieces of gold; to save it with one prescription is to show your great virtue." His book was named as "Qianjin Yaofang" (Essential Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold), which was just a manifestation of such a noble moral character. He gathered and studied the medical data before the Tang Dynasty, with reference to his own clinical experience of several decades, wroteBeiji Qianjin Yaofang(Essential Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gol
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The following article is extracted from an article first published in Singapore Medical Journal, 2002, Vol 43 (5) , pg 224-225
by S Y Tan, Professor of Medicine, University of Hawaii. An article published in the 100th year anniversay souvenir magazine of Thong Chai Medical Institution also pay tribute to this great physician and apothecary.
Sun Si Miao lived and practised in China during the Tang Dynasty (619-907 A.D.). Born in 581 A.D. in Huayuan (Jingzhao), he was a sickly child, and the cost of medical treatments that reduced his family to poverty, motivated him to enter into the study of medicine. He rapidly learned the wisdom of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, mastered the Chinese classics by age twenty, and quickly rose to renown for his apothecary skills.
Although Sun Si Miao travelled distances as far as Sichuan province in search of medical knowledge and herbal prescriptions, he lived most of his life secluded in the caves of Wubai Mountain. Preferring the simplicity of a hermit’s life, this great and humble physician spent his professional life treating all who
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SUN SIMIAO
Author of the Earliest Chinese Encyclopedia for Clinical Practice
by Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., Director, Institute for Traditional Medicine, Portland, Oregon
Sun Simiao is one of the most, if not the most, interesting figures in the history of Chinese medicine. It is not too difficult to support this judgment, even though biographical details of this Tang physician are only fragmentary. In his lifetime, Sun Simiao was a famous clinician and alchemist; to posterity, he left voluminous formularies that have been influential until the present.
- Paul Unschuld, 2000
Medicine in China: Historical Artifacts and Images
Sun Simiao was born in the 6th Century, around 581 A.D., at the beginning of the short-lived Sui Dynasty (581-618 A.D.) and just prior to the unification of north and south China (589 A.D.). He carried out his medical work and writing during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) and died in 682 A.D., having completed two 30-volume works on medical practice that would establish his place as a central figure
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