A Georeferenced Dataset of Historical Physicians in the Fuhe River Basin and Its Historical Periphery, Jiangxi Province (206 BCE–1949)

This dataset provides structured information on 1,030 historical physicians from the Xujiang, now Fuhe, River basin and its historical periphery in Jiangxi Province, covering the period from 206 BCE to 1949. The spatial scope includes 16 core counties in the Fuhe River basin and 5 historically connected peripheral counties. The dataset was produced through source-list definition, item-level structured entry, historical-to-modern place-name mapping, county-seat-level WGS84 geocoding, five-period temporal coding, specialty and interpersonal-relation coding, manual review, and script-based consistency checks.The release package contains a physician master table, an audited interpersonal relations table, a 16-county driving-factor table, a period lookup table, a field codebook, supplementary coding rules, and a README file. The physician master table contains 1,030 records and 21 fields, including names, aliases, birth and death years, active periods, standardized historical periods, historical and modern native places, longitude and latitude, coordinate precision, specialty labels, numbers of medical works, inheritance descriptions, data sources, reliability grades, original text excerpts, and academic contribution tags. The audited relations table contains 72 records and 13 fields, and the county variable table contains 16 county-level records and 14 fields. Measurement units include persons, records, medical works, county-level records, and WGS84 decimal-degree coordinates.Missing information is explicitly retained in the dataset. Fields such as birth and death years, aliases, and main practice locations have relatively high missingness because of limitations in historical sources. The specialty label “unspecified” indicates insufficient source information. Two county-variable fields, namely academy counts in the Ming-Qing period and population in the Ming-Qing period, are reserved for later evidence supplementation and are not used in the current statistical analysis. Data reliability is classified into three grades: Grade A, 114 records; Grade B, 612 records; and Grade C, 304 records. Users should note that all coordinates in the current version are at the county-seat level and are not suitable for township-level spatial inference. Specialty labels are intended for exploratory classification and descriptive statistics. The 72 audited relations support family-lineage and small-scale master-disciple genealogy reconstruction, but should not be interpreted as a complete knowledge-graph-scale network. Files are released in XLSX, CSV, PDF, and TXT formats and can be read with Excel, WPS, LibreOffice, R, Python pandas, and common GIS software.