Medical Tales from Linjiang: Life-Saving Remedies from a Yellowed Notebook

Worried the cold medicine you bought is just flour mixed with dye? Losing sleep because hospital bills are crushing you? At Chunhetang in Qingxi’s morning market, Su Jingxing keeps a worn, yellowing notebook close at hand, offering ordinary people a way to get by without spending a cent: ginger and scallion porridge for chills and high fever, dandelions picked by the river for a sore throat. Even when bloodletting is the only emergency option, he always follows it with a bowl of millet porridge. “Once you’ve let blood, you need nourishment to build up your strength and fight off the illness.”

The notebook contains more than household remedies. Tucked inside are old notes from his grandfather’s fight against an epidemic in 1943. In a faded passage, the handwriting reads, “After bloodletting at Dazhui, replenish fluids with porridge.” Outside the clinic, fake-herb peddlers try to stir up trouble. His young apprentice, Lin Yanqiu, initially scoffs that “recovery takes too long,” until she sees a child’s indigestion fever brought down with a belly rub. Even Zhao Wei, a modern doctor, gradually comes to believe that “treating the body in harmony with its needs causes less suffering than antibiotics.”

There’s no obscure medical theory here, just practical ways to save lives: grow mugwort on the balcony to warm aching old legs, use a glass jar as a cupping vessel, and give new mothers red date and millet porridge to replenish their qi and blood. Opening this book feels like stepping into Qingxi’s morning mist, where you can see how ordinary people use a bowl of porridge and a handful of herbs to avoid fake-medicine scams and weather the trials of illness.