The sixty heads · liu shi shou

In brief

The sixty heads of the extraordinary and the constant: an ancient diagnostic writing in sixty sections, named here and now lost. The chapter says 奇恒之勢，乃六十首 — the configurations of the extraordinary and the constant are sixty in number — and then states what a physician does with them: 診合微之事，追陰陽之變，章五中之情，其中之論，取虛實之要，定五度之事，知此乃足以診. So the sixty heads are not sixty diseases but sixty heads of reading: the finest agreements, the changes of yin and yang, the conditions within the five viscera, and from them the crux of deficiency and excess and the five measures. The number sixty is the old round of the calendar applied to diagnosis, as the sixty-year cycle is.