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.
chì
The last stage of the disease that entered as wind-cold. When the kidney transmits to the heart, the sinews and vessels pull against one another and tighten, and this is named 瘛. It is the point at which only cautery and medicine remain, and after ten full days death is due by rule. The word is close in form to the 瘈 of 瘈瘲 in chapter sixteen, and the two are often confused; this chapter writes 瘛, and the base text is followed here.
tuō yíng
The first of the two ills that have no outside cause, and the reason the first error is an error. A man was once honoured and has since fallen low; no evil has struck him, but the illness is born within, and it is called 脱營, the camp draining away. Wang Bing's gloss ties the name to the history: 嘗貴後賤，謂之脱營. What drains is the camp qi, the portion that runs inside the vessels; when it comes away the body dwindles day by day, the qi is deficient and without essence, and the man is chilled and startled from time to time. The physician who examines him finds nothing — the illness is not in the viscera and receptacles, and the bodily form has not changed — so he doubts, and does not know the name. That is precisely the case the chapter says one must ask about before treating.
bìng néng
The condition or bearing of an illness: 能 read as 態, not the ordinary 能. The chapter's great method runs 循尺滑濇寒溫之意，視其大小，合之病能，逆從以得，復知病名 — follow the cubit's smooth and rough, cold and warm, look at its great and small, join it to the condition of the illness; the contrary and the compliant being obtained, the name of the illness is known again. So 病能 is what the signs are joined to before the name is pronounced: the illness as it presents, not yet named. The Suwen has a whole discourse under this title (病能論, ch46), and the usage there is the same.
jué hàn
The sign the chapter gives for the end of the greater yang: 其色白，絶汗乃出，出則死矣. It is not ordinary sweating — the tradition describes it as sweat like oil or like beads, that comes out and does not run. It is the one sign in the chapter given as a threshold: before it, dying; when it appears, death. It is also the only one of the chapter's signs whose name later medicine kept.
wǔ sè
The chapter's colour table, and the whole of its visual method. Five colours mean death — green like dead grass, yellow like unripe bitter orange, black like soot, red like clotted spoilt blood, white like dry bone — and five mean life: kingfisher feather, cock's comb, crab's belly, lard, crow's feather. What separates them is not hue but whether the colour gleams through, as cinnabar gleams through white silk. The last rule follows from that: any face with yellow left in it does not die, because the earth qi is still there.
wǔ bìng
The chapter explains its own term in the last four characters: a viscus is depleted, and the others gather into the empty place. Essence qi gathering in the heart gives unstoppable joy; in the lung, grief; in the liver, anxiety; in the spleen, fearfulness; in the kidney, terror. This is not possession but crowding — the sound organ's qi has somewhere to be, the depleted one's has none, so everything flows into it, and the patient's mood is decided by which organ is being crowded. It is one of the few places in the book where a state of mind is given a purely mechanical cause.
wǔ luàn
Five states, every one of them produced by evil crossing a line it should not cross. Entering yang it makes mania; entering yin, obstruction; striking yang, disease of the crown of the head; striking yin, loss of voice. Then two more, which are the same rule read from the other side: yang going into yin makes quiet, yin coming out to yang makes anger. What the chapter is really giving is a way to place an illness by its manner — the raving patient and the silent one are on opposite sides of one line, and so are the quiet one and the furious one.
wǔ xíng zhì
The chapter's most quoted passage, and the book's clearest piece of social medicine: five ways of living, each with its own site of disease and its own treatment. Body at ease with mind embittered makes disease in the vessels; both at ease makes it in the flesh; body labouring with mind at ease makes it in the sinews; both embittered makes it in the throat; a body repeatedly frightened makes it in numbness. The principle the list rests on is that treatment is chosen for the tissue and not for the complaint, and the treatments run outward to inward — cautery, then needle and stone, then heat and traction, then drugs, then rubbing and wine. The fifth case is the one to notice: it is the only one attributed to what happened to a person rather than to how they lived.
wǔ bì
What ten days of decoction was meant to drive out, together with the eight winds. Wang Bing names the five by tissue: the obstructions of skin, flesh, sinew, bone and vessel. The Newly Collated edition corrects him on his source — the passage he quotes as from the Discourse on Obstruction is not in that chapter, and should be attributed to the Discourse on Wind, with the list of obstructions quoted separately. The site's own entry on 痺 follows the definition given in Suwen 10: blood that moves and cannot return to its hollow.
wǔ qì suǒ bìng
The longest entry in the chapter and the one the clinic has used most: for each viscus, the symptom that is properly its own. The heart gives belching, the lung coughing, the liver talking, the spleen swallowing, the kidney yawning and sneezing — and then the list runs past its own heading, because what the five qi do cannot be said without the organs they pass through. Read it as a set of signs an organ puts out, not as a set of named diseases: the chapter is telling you what each one looks like when it is disordered.
wǔ láo
The most quotable entry in the chapter and the one that has aged best: long looking injures the blood, long lying the qi, long sitting the flesh, long standing the bone, long walking the sinews. Nothing here is violent. The claim is that a posture kept long enough wears out the tissue it belongs to, which is why the list reads like a description of trades rather than of accidents. Chapter 21 had already stated the principle in a single word — overuse; this entry gives it five applications and says which tissue pays.
jīng sōu
The flow and the urine — 涇 jīng, water that runs; 溲 sōu, the urine — and the chapter uses it once, as the sign by which form in excess is known: 形有餘則腹脹，涇溲不利；不足則四支不用. The belly swells and what should pass does not. The commentaries split on how to divide the word. 吳崑 takes 涇 as the stool and 溲 as the urine, so the compound covers both outlets, and that is the reading that fits a belly that is full. 張介賓 takes 涇 for water that runs constantly and reads the whole phrase as the urine alone. Both are kept here, as they were in chapter 45, and neither is allowed to settle the other: what the chapter needs is that the two passages fail together, and both readings give it that. The word occurs once and has not appeared in any chapter transcribed on this site before.