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    Healing with Poisons

    Potent Medicines in Medieval China

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    Author(s)
    Liu, Yan
    Collection
    Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME)
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    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
    URI
    https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/75533
    Keywords
    Asian Studies, China, Medical History, history of medicine, Poison, Medicine, Drug, Alchemy, Technology, Tang, Empire, Daoism
    DOI
    10.6069/9780295749013
    ISBN
    9780295748993, 9780295749006, 9780295749013, 9780295749013
    Publisher
    University of Washington Press
    Publication date and place
    Seattle, 2021
    Grantor
    • University at Buffalo - TOME
    Pages
    278
    Public remark
    Funder name: University at Buffalo Libraries
    Rights
    https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    License

    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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