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.
lì fēng
Li wind is the disease later called 麻風 (leprosy): wind and cold lodged in the vessels that will not leave, rotting from the construction qi outward. Chapter 42 describes its end state rather than its beginning — the nose collapsed, the skin ulcerating — and gives it 寒熱 as an alternative name.
gān bì
The green case. The pulse comes long and knocks the fingers to left and right; the accumulated qi is below the heart, propping the flank. Two things make it stand out from the other four: the chapter says it is contracted from cold damp and treated by the same rule as 疝, and it is the only one given a list of symptoms — low back pain, cold feet, head pain. 足清 means cold feet: 清 is read as 凊.
gān fēng
Liver wind is the third store wind, and the one whose signs are temper and mood rather than pain. Wang Bing explains the grief: the liver disease leaves the heart with nothing to feed it, and the heart qi being empty, the patient grieves. It is read below the eye, blue-green.
shēng yáng sǐ yīn
The seventh chapter's rule for reading a disease that moves from one organ to another. If it follows the order in which the five phases generate one another — liver to heart — it is living yang, and the patient has days. If it follows the order in which they overcome one another — heart to lung — it is dying yin, and the count is three. Two further cases are named: lung to kidney is doubled yin, and kidney to spleen, running back against the order, is the rejected yin, which is beyond treatment.
kè
The verb chapter 39 runs on. Cold qi does not invade in the abstract: it lodges somewhere particular — outside the vessel, inside it, between the stomach and the intestines, along the spine, in a point on the back — and each address yields a different pain with a different answer to pressure.
cháng chóng
The round worms brought up by severe retching in stomach cough — the first of the six palace coughs, which arises when a spleen cough has gone on long enough to pass into the stomach.
bù yòng
The limbs are present and the flesh looks normal, and still they cannot be used. The chapter pairs it with numbness as the other half of the same picture: numbness is a failure of sensing and is laid to construction qi; loss of use is a failure of acting and is laid to defence qi. When both are vacuous, a person neither feels nor moves.
yīn
Loss of voice. In chapter 40 it is the result of doing the right thing at the wrong time: cauterise a counterflow whose yang is doubled above and the yin enters with the yang, and speech is lost.
yīn fèi
The illness chapter 49 names when depletion within is carried as far as inversion: the voice goes and the limbs fail. The chapter calls it depletion of the kidney, because the lesser yin vessel no longer reaches upward to the root of the tongue. The base text writes 俳 from 人; the received text writes 痱 from 疒, and the two are read alike as fèi.
yāo tòng
Pain in the lower back — the single complaint chapter 41 treats, and the symptom by which it sorts vessels. The character of the pain, and where it runs, is what tells the doctor which vessel to needle.
fèi bì
The white case. The pulse arrives racing and floating, empty above and full below, and there is fright. Accumulated qi sits in the chest; the breathing is laboured and the qi itself is empty, and the disease comes with cold and heat. Its cause is the most ordinary thing in the chapter: drunkenness, and going in. The chapter pairs the laboured breathing with an empty pulse, which is the point — the effort is real and the qi is not there.