Zhang of Xiuchuan was a surgeon. He had been a constable in the prefecture.
His wife met a divine man who called himself the King of the Skin Field, and gave her a book of unusual prescriptions for ulcers, and taught her the general principles of the hand, so she became famous as a doctor. People called her Zhang the Little Mistress. She later taught her husband.
The grandmother of the Zhang county magistrate of Wu was a concubine of Zhang Zihou. At seventy an ulcer broke out on her back, and Zhang was invited to treat it.
He first drained the sore and kept the discharged pus and blood in a cup, let it settle, and examined the dregs, and the congealed part was red as cinnabar. He came out and said to the magistrate: “This is the poison of taking elixirs, and the trend is hard to cure.”
The magistrate was angry: “In her life the old woman never took a single warming medicine, let alone elixirs. How can you talk such nonsense?”
The mother in the room heard him and hurriedly called him in and said: “He is right. When I was young in your house, every time the master took a fired elixir he made us take a pill with him. Over a long time there were many, and so the poison root was stored up. It is too late to regret now.”
Zhang apologised and left, and the mother died of it soon after.
Lou Xiasheng’s concubine, a woman named Xiang, had a very foul ulcer. A village doctor cauterised it with moxa, and suddenly the flesh rose up like a rolled flower, rather like a curled calyx, or mistakenly touched by something, and the pain went through her heart.
Zhang said: “This is called a turning-flower brain ulcer. People with it are extremely few, and my prescription books do not record a treatment.” And he left her and went.
The village doctor applied medicated thread and tied it off, and in half a day the roll fell with the thread, but it formed again, four or five times over, and she never recovered. After several tens of days the concubine died.
