Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China by Yan Liu (review)

Abstract

Based on his revised dissertation, Liu Yan’s new book Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China is a welcoming addition to the Englishlanguage scholarship on the history of medicines in China, focusing on the medieval transformation of poisons as medicines. In the past two decades, the history of pharmacology, pharmacy, and medicines in China has experienced a booming development across the globe. Many books focus on early modern, modern, and contemporary periods. For example, just in the past couple of years, we have seen the publications of Know Your Remedies: Pharmacy and Culture in Early Modern China (Princeton, ) and Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China (Duke, ). However, many books on premodern periods have been published in Chinese, Japanese, and French, as Liu Yan also noted in the introduction of his new book. On the one hand, these books resulted from the flourishing of cultural history that focused on the body, health, medicine, and life. On the other hand, there was also inspiration from newly available materials, such as manuscripts found in Dunhuang and other sites in Central Asia and entombed stone inscriptions. Indeed, Chinese and Japanese scholars have continued the tradition of studying materia medica (bencao) to compile, edit, and study these manuscripts. In recent years, some East Asian scholars also attempted to incorporate new concepts to interpret these new materials in light of the history of medicine and material culture. One of the strengths of Liu’s book is to digest numerous secondary sources in East Asian languages. Besides incorporating secondary sources, Healing with Poisons focused on two genres of texts as primary sources, meteria medica (bencao) and formula books (fangshu). I would further point out that from the perspective of material culture, since there were three major material sources for Chinese medicines in medieval China: animals, plants, and minerals, many texts on the roles of plants, animals, and minerals in Chinese medical history might not be categorized into the two genres noted in Healing with Poisons, so their values for this theme might have been underestimated. For example, the text on zoomancy or animal divination collected in Treatise on the Auspicious Signs of Heaven and Earth (Tiandi ruixiang zhi 天地瑞祥志) often mentioned the animals serving as medicine for healing illness. Healing with Poisons has three parts and seven chapters. The first two parts trace the origins and evolving transformation of the “du” as “potent” or “potency” from poison to medicine in the textual sources from the Han to the  China Review International: Vol. , No. , 