The presentation of diagnostic information in these works of Zhang Zhongjing confirms the importance of inquiry, since it is by this means that one learns the essential features described throughout most of the text, such as location of pain, duration of disease, and other factors that determine the selection of herbs (thirst, mental conditions, urination, etc.). In his preface to the Huangdi Neijing, Zhang continues the complaint expressed in the Neijing about practitioners in his time, a century or more after the Neijing was produced in the form we have currently:
Physicians today do not thoroughly study the medical classics before they begin to practice, but merely follow their predecessors with no attempt to improve age-old forms....They take the front pulse, but not the rear; check the hands, but not the feet; and do not make a diagnosis of the complete upper, middle, and lower parts of the body. How can a pulse alone and careless observation tell about all the syndromes and diseases?
The concern is about incomplete and careless diagnosis, particularly where the pulse is the primary diagnostic method (omitting or minimizing the others), and failure to carry out the full pulse taking (front and rear pulses). This is a theme that persists throughout Chinese medical history, and applies to modern medical diagnostics as well (where medical doctors are chided for having missed a diagnosis by not performing all necessary tests or by carelessly interpreting the test results). The proclaimed failings in the Han Dynasty times, an era regarded by subsequent authors as one of the high points of Chinese medicine, illustrate that the reverence for the past is aimed at the wise instructions of the small number of highly accomplished scholar physicians (who left behind the classic texts), rather than the state of medical practice as a whole. The desire, which can only be professed and never fully accomplished, is that all physicians should attain the highest possible standard and should master the diagnostic methods through diligent study of the classics and continual attention to detail.
