xīn shàn
Also rendered: heart shan (Keeps the term untranslated, as hernia is misleading) · heart hernia (Traditional but anatomically wrong) · heart pain and swelling (Descriptive paraphrase)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The chapter’s worked example of reading a pulse into a named illness. 診得心脉而急 — a tight heart pulse — is 心疝, and the lower abdomen should show a form. The Emperor asks how that can be, since the heart is nowhere near the lower abdomen, and Qibo answers with the logic of the interior-exterior pairing: the heart is a male depot, the small intestine is its envoy, and the small intestine is down there. The passage is worth its place because it shows the reasoning the book expects — not a symptom list, but a chain from pulse to depot to paired bowel to place.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Common English | heart shan; older translators write heart hernia | Hernia is the received rendering of 疝 and is still common. |
| This site | heart shan | 疝 in 說文 is simply 腹痛, pain in the abdomen — it is a pain with a gathering behind it, not a protrusion. Hernia imports an anatomy the word never had and makes nonsense of the chapter's own reasoning, which locates a heart shan in the lower abdomen not by rupture but by pairing. Shan is left standing, as 痺 and 瘧 are elsewhere on this site. |
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Reading path
Guided routes through the corpus, each built on a handful of chapters and their key terms.
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