yì yǐn
Also rendered: overflow rheum (Literal; rheum for 飲) · spreading fluid retention (Clinical and modern) · effusion of drink (Older literal rendering)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
Chapter 17’s account of what happens when a man drinks heavily while very thirsty: the fluid does not stay in the stomach and intestines but passes easily into the space between the flesh and the skin, and that is 溢飲. The chapter’s reason for discussing it here is diagnostic: a liver pulse that is soft and scattered, with a complexion that is still glossy, points to overflow rheum rather than to injury — where a hard and long liver pulse with a complexion that is not green points to blood collected under the flanks from a fall.
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 | fluid retention, or spreading rheum | Modern clinical Chinese writing on 飲 usually says fluid retention. |
| This site | overflow rheum | 溢 is 器滿, a vessel running over — the picture is of a container that could not hold what was poured into it, which is exactly the chapter's account: 渴暴多飲, a great draught taken suddenly, and the fluid then 易入肌皮腸胃之外, easily passing outside where it belongs. Rheum rather than retention because 飲 names the fluid itself; retention names what failed to happen to it, which is one step further from the word. |
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