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oapen-20.500.12657-755332023-08-17T02:26:32Z Healing with Poisons Liu, Yan Asian Studies, China, Medical History, history of medicine, Poison, Medicine, Drug, Alchemy, Technology, Tang, Empire, Daoism bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HB History::HBJ Regional & national history::HBJF Asian history bic Book Industry Communication::M Medicine::MB Medicine: general issues::MBX History of medicine At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from chills to pains to epidemics. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious devotees, court officials, and laypeople used powerful substances to both treat intractable illnesses and enhance life. It illustrates how the Chinese concept of du—a word carrying a core meaning of “potency”—led practitioners to devise a variety of techniques to transform dangerous poisons into efficacious medicines. Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the early Tang period, Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to the ways people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. Liu also examines a wide range of du-possessing minerals, plants, and animal products in classical Chinese pharmacy, including the highly poisonous herb aconite and the popular arsenic drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body’s interaction with potent medicines, this study cautions against arbitrary classifications and exemplifies the importance of paying attention to the technical, political, and cultural conditions in which substances become truly meaningful. Healing with Poisons is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of the University at Buffalo Libraries. DOI 10.6069/9780295749013 2023-08-16T07:52:49Z 2023-08-16T07:52:49Z 2021 book 9780295748993 9780295749006 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/75533 eng application/pdf application/epub+zip Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 9780295749013.pdf 9780295749013.epub https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295749006/healing-with-poisons University of Washington Press 10.6069/9780295749013 10.6069/9780295749013 bf4ecffe-ae79-41c6-a4b1-18e7b7aac1b9 a3f7ee10-c3c5-4825-aaaa-966c0a39b277 9780295748993 9780295749006 Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME) 278 Seattle TOME University at Buffalo SUNY Buffalo open access
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At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from chills to pains to epidemics. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious devotees, court officials, and laypeople used powerful substances to both treat intractable illnesses and enhance life. It illustrates how the Chinese concept of du—a word carrying a core meaning of “potency”—led practitioners to devise a variety of techniques to transform dangerous poisons into efficacious medicines.
Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the early Tang period, Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to the ways people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. Liu also examines a wide range of du-possessing minerals, plants, and animal products in classical Chinese pharmacy, including the highly poisonous herb aconite and the popular arsenic drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body’s interaction with potent medicines, this study cautions against arbitrary classifications and exemplifies the importance of paying attention to the technical, political, and cultural conditions in which substances become truly meaningful.
Healing with Poisons is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of the University at Buffalo Libraries.
DOI 10.6069/9780295749013
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