The Modern Shāng Hán Lùn — Volume III

Eight clauses and one idea: the digestion has gone cold and slack. Fullness without hardness, vomiting, diarrhoea and a pain that eases with warmth and pressure — and the standing warning that purging here makes everything worse.

A faint, fine pulse and a patient who only wants to sleep. The opening clauses set out how depleted a Shào Yīn patient really is, and which presentations must never be sweated.

Where the division does its hardest work: cold limbs, undigested food in the stool, and the graded rescue formulas — Sì Nì Tāng, Tōng Mài Sì Nì Tāng, Zhēn Wǔ Tāng and the Fù Zǐ pairings.

The other face of Shào Yīn: restless insomnia answered by Huáng Lián Ē Jiāo Tāng, the sore-throat sequence, and the three urgent purgation clauses that close the division.

The outline clause with its thirst, its hunger without appetite and its warning against purging, and the great mixed formula of the division, Wū Méi Wán.

Counting the days of fever against the days of cold limbs to read where the illness is heading, and separating cold reversal from heat reversal before you reach for a formula.

Clear-food diarrhoea, hiccup, dysenteric diarrhoea with straining, and the formulas that answer them — Bái Tóu Wēng Tāng, Sì Nì Tāng, Wú Zhū Yú Tāng and the Xiǎo Chái Hú Tāng crossover.

Vomiting and diarrhoea together, fluid lost from both ends at once. The rules for telling a cold turmoil from a damp-heat one, with Lǐ Zhōng Wán and Wǔ Líng Sǎn on either side of the decision.

The closing chapter of the book, and the one most useful in an ordinary practice: how people relapse after a serious illness through overwork, overeating or resuming sex too soon, and how to feed a recovering patient.