The Biography of Medical Sage Zhang Zhongjing: Dawn in the Green Sac

At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, in the mourning hall of Zhang Mansion in Nanyang, Zhang Zhongjing looked at the coffins of more than 20 members of his family who died of typhoid fever, digging his nails into his palms. During the Jian'an period, epidemics spread like wildfire. He abandoned his official position and became a doctor. He traveled all over Jingxiang with a basket of medicine on his back. When he saw a woman holding a child with fever and convulsions under the eaves of a thatched house and crying bitterly, he vowed to "diligently seek ancient teachings and learn from all kinds of prescriptions." When he was the prefect of Changsha, he broke the rule of "not accepting medical advice from officials and people" and sat in the court on the first and fifteenth day of every month, diagnosing pulses, prescribing prescriptions and administering medicine. The people called him "the medical saint who sits in the court". In troubled times, he compiled "Treatise on Febrile and Miscellaneous Diseases" under an oil lamp in a ruined temple, cracked the law of cold evil transmission with the method of "syndrome differentiation and treatment", and created hundreds of good prescriptions such as "Guizhi Decoction" and "Mahuang Decoction", and even the use of Mafei Powder was incorporated into it. When Cao Cao's army marched south, more than half of his bamboo slips' medical manuscripts were lost in the flames of war. Disciple Wang Shuhe risked his life to collect the scraps, but saw Zhang Zhongjing pointing out the window with a smile on his bed: "Medical books can be destroyed, but the pathogenesis of the disease is not destroyed; decoctions can be lost, but syndrome differentiation is not lost." Before his death, he condensed what he had learned throughout his life into the eight characters "see the disease and know the source, and then treat it accordingly", and his eyes glanced at the still-dry ink on his desk - that was the chapter of dawn he had written for the people of the world. "Treatise on Febrile Diseases and Miscellaneous Diseases" has eventually become the teacher of traditional Chinese medicine for all generations, and his figure sitting in the hall for consultation has long been transformed into an eternal silhouette of the hanging pot to help the world.