Yan Liu

In Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China, Dr. Yan Liu argues, “The effect of any given substance – whether it healed as a medicine, or sickened or killed as a poison, or altered a person in myriad other ways – varied greatly according to the way in which it was prepared and developed, the bodily sensation it induced, and its assigned value in society” (pgs. 6-7). Accordingly, the work builds upon the historiography of material culture as well as medicine to “enhance our understanding of the traditional value of poisons in Asia” (pg. 7). Liu writes that the “notion of potency, the ability not just to harm as a poison but also to cure as a medicine, lay at the core of drug therapy in premodern China” (pg. 20). As Liu describes, early medical texts like The Divine Farmer’s Classic and Collected Annotations organized drugs based on their potency. Later physicians built upon the relational nature of medicine. Liu writes, “The correspondence between drug combination and bureaucratic organization is a clear example of the strong influence of political thought on medical writing in early China. In particular, the Han empire established an ideology rooted in the resonance between the cosmos, the state, and the body of the ruler” (pg. 43). Medical treatises employed analogies based on society in their directions while Emperors and their courts used their influence to collect materials and compile recipes. Later, “the Tang court collected a set of potent drugs from across the empire through an extensive tribute system, which was an imperial network for the acquisition of natural or manufactured products from local regions” (pg. 82). Turning to Five-Stone Powder, Lie concludes that many historians’ comparison of the drug’s danger to that of opium “is probably an exaggeration” as it played a “rhetorical use, which served specific social and political functions” (pg. 132). Further, some recipes inadvertently substituted ingredients, altering the potency of Five-Stone Powder by region and time period (pg. 137). Thus, Liu demonstrates how medicines functioned within medieval Chinese material culture to reflect socio-political values and bridge literary thought with bodily experience. He concludes that the role of poisons in the medieval Chinese pharmacy “invite[s] us into the intimate and complex relationship between the human self and the world. Medicines, a special kind of materiality, become a crucial mediator between the two” (pg. 175).… (mehr)