• The Journal of the Society of Korean Medicine Diagnostics
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.65-74
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• 2015

Objectives As a method of body temperature distribution diagnosis, palpation of infants' forehead had been widely introduced in ancient East Asian medical classics. However, few attention have been paid to this diagnostic method - so called 'emaizhenduan (額脈診斷)'. So we studied the history of emaizhenduan and it's implication in modern clinical field. Materials and methods: To search the medical classic that contains any contents of emaizhenduan, we mainly used the electronic texts of Zhonghuayidian (中華醫典). To search modern study article on emaizhenduan, we used China National Knowledge Infrastructure (www.cnki.net), National Digital Science Library (ndsl.kr) etc. Results 20 kinds of East Asian medical classics were found to contain contents on emaizhenduan. The oldest one was Huoyoukouyi (活幼口議) which was written in Yuan dynasty of China. Only one modern TCM book was found to have comments on emaizhenduan, while some textbooks of pediatrics in Korean Medicine was found to have relatively sound introduction on emaizhenduan. Conclusion It is shown in ancient East Asian medical classics that infants' forehead temperature palpation was introduced as early as late 13th century in China, and have continuously been referred in many East Asian medical classics before modern era.