Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China
- ISBN-10
- 0295749016
- ISBN-13
- 9780295749013
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 288
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-06-22
- Publisher
- University of Washington Press
- Author
- Yan Liu
Description
Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749013 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 employed as healing agents to cure everything from abdominal pain to epidemic disease. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious figures, court officials, and laypersons used toxic substances to both relieve acute 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 methods to transform dangerous poisons into effective medicines. Recounting scandals and controversies involving poisons from the Era of Division to the Tang, historian Yan Liu considers how the concept of du was central to how the people of medieval China perceived both their bodies and the body politic. He also examines the wide range of toxic minerals, plants, and animal products used in classical Chinese pharmacy, including everything from the herb aconite to the popular recreational drug Five-Stone Powder. By recovering alternative modes of understanding wellness and the body’s interaction with foreign substances, 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 of Buffalo.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China
By Yan Liu, Assistant Professor of History Yan LiuHealing 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.
-
Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China
By Yan Liu, Assistant Professor of History Yan LiuHealing 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.
-
Changing Poison into Medicine: Poetry & Proses of Self Healing & Love
By Aditi ShuklaThe book rides you through the most painful times of your life and shows how during those crucial times of adversity you could change the poisons within you into medicine and healings for others and lead your life with utmost dignity and ...
-
Botanical Curses and Poisons: The Shadow-Lives of Plants
By Fez InkwrightFolklorist Fez Inkwright returns to the archives to reveal fascinating stories behind a variety of lethal plants, witching herbs, and funghi.
-
Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations
By Sharla M. FettWorking Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.
-
The Poison Path Herbal: Baneful Herbs, Medicinal Nightshades, and Ritual Entheogens
By Coby Michael• Explains how to work with baneful herbs through rituals and spells, as plant spirit familiars, as potent medicines, and as visionary substances • Details the spiritual, alchemical, astrological, and symbolic associations of each plant ...
-
The Antidote: Healing America from the Poison of Hate, Blame, and Victimhood
By Jesse Lee Peterson"Traces the collapse of the black community in America to an unexpected source: the anger against one's mother and father that fatherlessness engenders"--Provided by publisher.
-
The Hollow Bettle
By Susannah AppelbaumEleven-year-old Ivy Manx sets out with her new friend, a young "taster," to find her missing uncle, an outlawed healer, in the dangerous kingdom of Caux where magic, herbs, and poisons rule.
-
Urine Therapy: Nature's Elixir for Good Health
By Flora Peschek-Böhmer, Gisela SchreiberIn addition to protocols for using urine to treat a wide array of diseases, the book offers a program that teaches you step-by-step to overcome any initial aversion to urine therapy.
-
Phytomedicines, Herbal Drugs, and Poisons
By Ben-Erik van Wyk, Michael WinkIn Phytomedicines, Herbal Drugs, and Poisons, Ben-Erik van Wyk offers a richly illustrated, scientific guide to medicinal and poisonous plants, including those used for their mind-altering effects.