shǒu dú
Also rendered: The poisonous hand (plain, and it sounds like a snakebite) · Hand noxiousness (abstract, and it loses the experiment) · Hand poison (the site's convention, short and concrete)
Reviewed · 2026-10-26
At a glance
Hand poison is the chapter’s test for the man who should be set to pressing accumulations. After listing who is fit for what — the clear-eyed for colour, the sharp-eared for sound, the quick-tongued for disputation, the steady hand for needles and moxa, the gentle for stretching and guiding — Huang Di adds the last office: 爪苦手毒，爲事善傷者，可使按積抑痺. The hard-nailed and hand-poisoned man, the one who breaks what he handles, is the man for pressing masses and suppressing obstructions. The test is a tortoise: put it under a vessel, press the vessel for fifty days, and 手毒者 the tortoise dies; 手甘者 it comes back as it was. The passage is the Lingshu’s one experiment, and its point is that the capacity is in the hand and not in the intention — which is why the chapter can assign offices at all.
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.
| This site | hand poison | the quality, not the man |
| Literal | poisonous hand | exact, and it suggests venom |
| Clinical | the injurious touch | clear, and it explains the tortoise |
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