She Medicine
01 · Historical Records
Sha syndrome therapy belongs to the orally transmitted knowledge of the She people, who have a language but no script; their prescriptions and manipulations rely entirely on oral transmission from master to apprentice, learned and verified at the bedside. As to the number of sha syndromes, among the people there have successively been different accounts of thirty-six, seventy-two, and one hundred and eight kinds, showing that this experience accumulated separately among different inheritors and is difficult to unify. The Lishui area is where this experience is most concentrated; in the She townships of seven counties and county-level districts, including Jingning and Liandu, there were many families of hereditary doctors. Falls on mountain paths, bites by snakes and insects, and children's gan accumulation induced by damp-heat kept the methods of releasing sha and picking sha repeatedly honed. The practice style also changed with mountain life: doctors on house calls often carried cloth sacks and gathered herbs as needed, using folk medicinal herbs that could be picked on the spot, such as litsea fruit, broken-coin herb, ground-collapsing centipede, sticky-flower herb, and leaf-white.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The radiation areas include Taishun and Wencheng in Zhejiang and some townships in Fujian. She medicine is a traditional medicine explored and created by the She people in their long-term production and life practices to adapt to their living environment and health requirements. It is an important component of traditional Chinese medicine, with regional, ethnic, and family-transmitted characteristics. Because the She people live in mountainous or semi-mountainous areas, they have unique medical methods and medication habits, and have accumulated many ancestral secret formulas and empirical methods in treating traumatic injuries, snakebites, rheumatism, icteric hepatitis, children's gan accumulation, pneumonia, and osteomyelitis. At present, most folk She doctors are advanced in age, and some famous She doctors have already passed away. The general method of treating sha syndromes is sha-releasing therapy. For milder cases, sha-scraping, sha-pinching, sha, and sha-rubbing methods are commonly used. For acute and severe cases, needling, bloodletting, sha-picking, or combined treatment with She medicines are used. Treatment relies mainly on single herbs, proven formulas, or syndrome-differentiated compound formulas; the most commonly used medicinals include litsea fruit, broken-coin herb, ground-collapsing centipede, sticky-flower herb, and leaf-white, more than ten kinds in all. The She understanding of sha syndromes is relatively direct and vivid, full of philosophical meaning, and its treatment is highly distinctive. However, there is as yet no unified account of the types of sha syndrome. Some hold that there are 36 kinds of sha syndrome, but most hold there are 72, and there is also the account of 108.
Light cases treated by scraping, pinching and rubbing
Milder cases are handled by hand, scraping the back and limbs, pinching up the petechiae or rubbing the sore part.
Picking, blood-letting and needling
Acute severe cases are treated by picking the petechiae, bleeding the collaterals and needling, supported by She herbal remedies.
Single herbs, tested recipes and compound prescriptions
Single drugs, tested recipes and syndrome-based compounds are all used, with about ten common She herbs employed singly or in combination.
Thirty-six, seventy-two or one hundred and eight kinds
There is no agreed count of sha syndromes, ranging from thirty-six to seventy-two or one hundred and eight.
Diagnosing, gathering and preparing in the field
She practice joins medicine to pharmacy and relies on herbs gathered on the spot rather than on shops or markets.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
She medicine is mainly distributed in the She townships of seven counties (cities, districts) in Lishui, Zhejiang, including the Jingning She Autonomous County and Liandu.
Other submitting regions for the same item: She Medicine.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Because the She people have a language but no script, She medicine is mostly transmitted orally and understood through insight, learned and verified in practice, with medicine and pharmacy as one, emphasizing practice. Its characteristics of self-diagnosis, self-collection, self-preparation, self-compounding, and self-use determine the difficulty of its transmission. Therefore, rescuing and organizing She medicine and developing She medicine have become urgent tasks. She sha syndrome therapy is one of the most distinctive treatment methods in She medicine. Many She doctors and She people still transmit and master a variety of sha-releasing techniques, which often effect an immediate cure. She sha syndrome therapy is an important component of She medical science and a treasure in the treasure house of the motherland's medicine, and is of great significance for the transmission and development of the motherland's medical culture. At present, this ethnic traditional medical culture, like other traditional medical cultures, faces the impact of Western medicine and is struggling to advance; it urgently needs protection.
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
This static English edition is rendered at the edge for search engines, AI crawlers and readers without JavaScript; it mirrors the bilingual dossier. 阅读中文版，或返回 英文名录。