Yan Liu, Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China

From the second half of the twentieth century onward, the more that modern biomedicine has developed, the more skepticism there has been toward synthetic drugs in Euro-American societies. Chinese herbs, on the other hand, are considered natural, safe, toxin-free remedies. However, in Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China, Yan Liu insightfully reminds us that Chinese herbs are not as safe as we imagine. He utilizes medical documents from medieval China to illustrate that poisonous drugs, or “potent drugs” as he calls them, possess “the power not just to harm as a poison but also to cure as a medicine in Chinese medicine” (6). With this fluid characteristic of potent drugs in mind, we need to rethink the concept of “poison” and reevaluate the role that poison played culturally and politically in medieval China (and even in modern society). The Sui–Tang period (581–907), as Yan Liu argues in his remarkable book, was critical for the transition of traditional pharmaceutical knowledge from formation to integration. Yan Liu obtained his PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University and is an expert in the history of medicine in medieval China. He probes the culture and politics of the Sui–Tang period through poisonous drugs. In the history of Chinese medicine, this period was characterized by the successful accumulation of medical knowledge formed in the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and provided a basis for integrating doctrinal learning and empirical knowledge in the Song Dynasty (960–1279). The most important medical policy of the Tang Dynasty was the publication of a national pharmacopoeia and the implementation of formal poisons regulation. This policy symbolized the empire intervening and standardizing medical knowledge and practices. In other words, Yan Liu contextualizes the development of poison and medical knowledge in the centralization of the empire and the discussion of “the Tang–Song transition.” The fluid characteristics of poisonous drugs is a critical lens through which to reconceptualize them in traditional medicine. Yan Liu disagrees with the absolutely