gǔ
Also rendered: gu (Transliteration, with a gloss — the disease is not a Western entity) · parasitosis (Clinical: what 蠱 was taken to be in later medicine) · worm infestation (Over-literal; the text names no worms here) · gu poison (Adds a toxin the passage does not mention)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
The second name the chapter gives to the disease at the kidney stage. Wind-cold that was never treated passes from the spleen to the kidney, where it is called 疝瘕 — with smouldering heat and pain in the lower abdomen and a white discharge — and it is also called 蠱. The alternative name matters: 疝瘕 describes what can be felt, while 蠱 names what is presumed to be causing it. At this stage only pressing and medicine remain; the three options of the spleen stage have been reduced to two.
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.
| Wiseman & Feng | gu | They keep 蠱 untranslated as a disease entity. |
| Unschuld | gu illness | Same practice, marked as an illness name. |
| This site | gu · parasitosis | 蠱 in 說文 is 腹中蟲, and the 春秋傳 gloss — insects breeding in a standing vessel — is the image behind the name: something has been left too long and has begun to generate. Nothing in the passage mentions worms, and the chapter is using 蠱 as a second name for a disease it has already described by its symptoms, so a bare transliteration is safer than an entomology. The gloss is added only because the word has a history in later medicine that readers will meet; it is not a claim that this text is describing one. |
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