The Benevolent Imperial Physician

In the fifth year of Jiande, under the Northern Zhou, the Zhang family of physicians in Nanyang welcomed a son and named him Huairen. The Zhang family had practiced medicine for generations, guided by a four-character ancestral motto: A physician's art is compassion. At twenty, Zhang Huairen slung on his medicine chest and left Nanyang. He started at the bottom as a medical attendant at the Imperial Medical Office, and at twenty-eight was appointed Director of Imperial Physicians. During the Daye era, he submitted his resignation three times because he could not bear to watch Yang Guang treat the people of the realm as kindling for his ambitions. When he left, he took with him a string of garlic, an old medicine chest, and a faded blue cotton robe. From then on, the jianghu gained a traveling physician. He treated Li Yuan's wife and diagnosed the emperor's pulse in Li Shimin, leaving him with a warning: “Too much bloodshed will surely bring Heaven's retribution.” After the Xuanwu Gate Incident, he stood atop the walls of Chang'an and secured the surrender of an army with a bowl of calming medicine. In Chang'an, he founded the Great Tang's first medical school, teaching everything he knew without regard for rank or wealth. He wrote the fifteen-volume Fragrance of Medicine Across the Realm, went to Hebei to stamp out an epidemic, and was honored with shrines built by the people. In the autumn of the second year of Zhenguan, Zhang Huairen died in Garlic Valley at the age of fifty-six. At the end, he said, “A physician's life is like a string of garlic: planted, sprouted, pulled up and carried elsewhere, then planted again. It goes on, generation after generation.” The highest physician heals the state, the middle physician heals people, and the lowest physician heals illness. The principles of treating the body and governing the state are one and the same.