The five errors · wu guo

In brief

The five errors are the chapter’s spine, and they are numbered as they arise. The first is to treat a man without asking whether he was once honoured and has fallen, or once rich and has grown poor; no evil has struck him, yet the illness is born within — 脱營 and 失精 — and the physician, finding nothing in the viscera and no change in the form, does not know its name. The second is not to ask of food and dwelling, of sudden joy and sudden hardship, and not to know supplement from drain. The third is to be skilled at the pulse and not to know the way, lacking the matching of kinds and the Congrong. The fourth is to be unable to be stern, unable to stir the spirit, soft and yielding outwardly, until the constant is lost. The fifth is to know neither end nor beginning, to ask nothing of what brought the illness on, and to speak only of the day of death. All five come, the chapter says at the close of the count, of receiving the art without penetrating it and of not understanding human affairs.