Each entry gives the term in traditional and simplified form, its pinyin, the senses it carries in the classical corpus, the passages where it does real work, and how published translations have rendered it.
tāng yè
The first resort of the physicians of middle antiquity: ten days of it, to drive out the illnesses of the eight winds and the five obstructions; and if ten days is not enough, herbs are added. The chapter grades eras by what they reach for — invocation in high antiquity, decoction in the middle, and in the late age both decoction and needle used too late. The Suwen has a whole chapter on the subject (湯液醪醴論), where the liquor is made from rice and fermented, and where the same pair 標本 appears.
bí yuān
A discharge from the nose that does not stop; produced when the gallbladder shifts heat into the brain. Still the standard Chinese medical name for chronic sinusitis.
wèi qì
Defensive qi is the brisk, circulating part of yang that patrols the surface, skin and interstices, opening and closing the pores and meeting exterior evils first. When it disperses, the surface is left open.
xū xié zéi fēng
Pathogenic factors named for how they arrive: they strike where defence is thin (虛) and get in unnoticed (賊). The instruction that follows — avoidance in season (避之有時) — is the corpus's earliest statement of preventive regimen.
zhān yán
Raving, disordered speech. In chapter 31 it appears only in the double-affected case, on the second day, when 陽明 and 太陰 are both diseased and the patient has abdominal fullness, body heat, no desire to eat and delirious speech. The significance is prognostic rather than descriptive: delirious speech belongs to the three-day descent that ends with no fluid going down, failure to recognise anyone, and death on the sixth day. It is one of the signs that the disease has gone inward and cannot be sweated out.
diān
Derangement — the falling sickness. Chapter 40 names it as what mineral drugs produce in a body already hot, paired with the madness that aromatic herbs produce.
diān bìng
An illness named by how often it comes. Chapter 55 gives no seizure and no pulse for it — only a calendar running the wrong way: once a year at first, then once a month if it is not treated, then four or five times a month, and only then is it given its name. The treatment is as general as the description: needle the partings and the vessels, and where there is no cold in them, regulate with the needle. The site's 癲疾 entry takes the disease from chapter 28, where it is judged entirely by the pulse; this is the same disease seen through its intervals.
gé xiāo
Wasting at the diaphragm, produced when the heart shifts heat into the lung and the illness transmits. The heat counterpart of the chapter's 肺消.
xuàn xuàn
Dizziness in which the eyes will not hold steady — things swim. The chapter places it in the kidney malaria between the difficult stool and the cold extremities, so that the three signs together read as a body whose processes have closed down: below, above, and without.
zāi
The disaster itself, and the sixth of the six terms by which this chapter sets out each of the five directions: 德 virtue, 化 transformation, 政 governance, 令 command, 變 change, 災 disaster. It is the only one of the six the chapter names by instance rather than by kind — what the disaster does, not what disaster is: in the east things scatter and fall, in the south they burn, in the centre the rain soaks and collapses, in the west the green falls, in the north there is ice, snow, frost and hail. It is paired with 眚 throughout, and the pair divides the one event into the thing and the place: 災 is what happens, 眚 is where it lands.
luàn qì
Disordered qi — 亂 luàn, thrown into disorder; 氣 qì — and the second half of this chapter exists to say how not to make it. The reasoning is given in one sentence: 是故邪氣者，常隨四時之氣血而入客也，至其變化，不可爲度，然必從其經氣，辟除其邪 — evil qi comes in as a guest, riding the qi and blood of the season; its changes cannot be measured; but it must be followed along the qi of its channel and driven out. Drive it out and 亂氣不生. Puncture against the season and 亂氣 arises — 反之，則生亂氣，相淫病焉 — and the disorder does something worse than the evil did, because it turns the body's own orderly qi against itself: 正氣内亂，與精相薄. It is not a disease with symptoms of its own. It is this chapter's word for what bad needling does.
zhàng mǎn
Distension and fullness — 脹 zhàng, swollen; 滿 mǎn, full — written together once in this chapter, in the entry for the stomach: 胃病，脹滿，五日少腹腰脊痛. The graph 脹 is a late one; 《說文》 does not have it, and 《玉篇》 glosses it with exactly this phrase, 脹，脹滿也. 《說文》 does have 滿，盈溢也, filled to overflowing. The chapter uses 脹 in other shapes throughout its catalogue — 而脹 three times, 腹脹 three times, 少腹脹 once — but this is the only place the two graphs stand side by side, and it is the stomach that gets them, which is fitting: the stomach is the viscus whose illness is felt as fullness before it is felt anywhere else.