王清任对传统医籍中脏腑记载的模糊与错讹深感不满，认为「业医诊病，当先明脏腑」，遂多次前往义冢、刑场实地观察尸体脏器结构，历时40余年撰成《医林改错》，纠正了前人对内脏形态、位置的多处错误认识，并提出「灵机记性不在心在脑」等超前见解，同时创立以活血化瘀为核心的系列方剂（如血府逐瘀汤），至今仍广泛应用于临床。

Dissatisfied with the vague and often mistaken accounts of internal organs in traditional medical texts, Wang Qingren held that a physician must first understand anatomy correctly. Over more than forty years he made repeated observations of exposed cadavers at paupers' graves and execution grounds, eventually compiling the Correction of Errors in Medical Literature, which corrected numerous longstanding misconceptions about the shape and position of internal organs and proposed the strikingly forward-looking view that memory and cognition reside in the brain rather than the heart. He also originated a family of blood-stasis-resolving formulas — including Xuefu Zhuyu Tang — still in wide clinical use today.