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Healing with Poisons - Potent Medicines in Medieval China (Hardcover)
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Healing with Poisons - Potent Medicines in Medieval China (Hardcover)
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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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