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
