Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts: Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licens

Transnational Travels of the Caterpillar Fungus, 1700-1949

This dissertation explores the transformation of Chinese materia medica in the 19th- and the first half of the 20th-centuries, especially the Republican period, in a global context. It is based on a microhistory of the caterpillar fungus, a curious object and also a medicinal substance initially used by Tibetans no later than the 15th century and then assimilated into Chinese materia medica from the 18th century. This study first traces the transmission of specimens and knowledge of the caterpillar fungus in Chinese society and from China to France, Britain, Russia and Japan by the end of the 19th century; then it investigates the tensions and negotiations between Chinese and newly produced European knowledge about the caterpillar fungus, initially emerging in 18th- and 19th-century Europe but then shifting to communities of scientists, traditional physicians and other intellectuals in Republican China. The overall research question is that why did the caterpillar fungus attract the attention of so many different scientific communities, and how did its transnational travels impact on the making of the 20th-century Chinese materia medica? Drawing on Bruno Latour’s discourse on the agency of objects and characterisations of modernity, this dissertation demonstrates that the caterpillar fungus stimulated people’s curiosity about exotic objects and their pursuit of new medicinal substances, with itself changing from a transformable wonder in China to a scientific wonder in Europe and East Asia in transnational networks of knowledge production; in the meantime the caterpillar fungus also witnessed the powerful rhetoric of modern science. On the basis of a further analysis of changes in knowledge about Chinese medicinal substances represented by the caterpillar fungus in Republican China, I argue that the ‘modern’ Chinese materia medica, characterised by plural knowledge systems related to and in conversation with the new goal of scientification, had never been modern