xiāo zhōng
Also rendered: wasting in the centre (Literal) · central wasting (The usual clinical phrase for 中消) · dispersion-thirst of the centre (Follows the later 消渴 tradition)
Reviewed · 2026-09
At a glance
What heat becomes when it settles, in chapter 17’s list of how an illness changes once formed: 癉成爲消中 — heat (癉, dān) becomes wasting in the centre. The word 消 is the same one the book uses for melt and for consume, and the classical picture is of a man who eats and is not nourished: the centre burns it away faster than it can be used. The chapter places it in a chain — wind becomes cold and heat, heat becomes wasting in the centre, counterflow becomes disease of the crown, standing wind becomes food-diarrhoea, wind in the vessels becomes pestilent sores — and then says the transformations cannot be counted.
Passages where the term does real work, with the original, pinyin and English on the same line.
Every rendering below is a decision about which reader is being addressed. There is no neutral option.
| Common English | central wasting, or middle wasting | The clinical literature renders 中消 as central dispersion or middle wasting. |
| This site | wasting in the centre | 消 is 盡, to be used up, and 說文's own example is ice dissolving — something solid going away by degrees. Centre is kept rather than middle burner because the chapter gives no burner vocabulary here; it only says 中. The phrase also lets the reader hear the kinship with the later 消渴 without importing that diagnosis into a chapter that is listing transformations, not diseases. |
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