In January 2010, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) released a photo taken by Italian news photographer Piero Cruciatti. filmed a corner of a pharmacy near Chongqing, and thus began a story about inflation.
A pharmacy near Chongqing, January 14, 2010.
You may see a similar article about the impact of inflation on commodities during the decade of the 21st century. However, neither the preface nor the articles in this book have anything to do with inflation. In fact, this ** shows what the book is about, that is, the material cultural context on which medical knowledge and practice depend.
Looking closely at the details, we can see a large wooden cabinet consisting of many drawers with labels, each with the name of the drug written on it. At the top of the cabinet, there is a row of ceramic vessels with lids, labeled;On the higher shelves in the back row, there are rows of transparent glass bottles and plastic jars, and we can directly see what is inside;On the far left of the shelf, there is a piece of paper that has been placed in a picture frame, which is most likely the business license of the store;On the wall behind the jar hangs a framed letter: a few lines of poetry, along with the names of poets and calligraphers.
Even if we don't know anything else about the store at the time of the 2010 shooting, we can learn a lot about the cultural background of the store's activities through this photo**. For example, these labels not only tell us what medicines are available in the store, but they also show the different styles, colors, and writers of the labelsThe text crossed out above indicates that the drugs sold are not set in stone. This information is indicative of the many ways in which the store displays its medications and changing consumer preferences. The materials of drug containers have also changed over time: wooden drawers, ceramic jars, glass bottles, and plastic jars. Although they are made of different materials, they are both used to store medicines. These containers show the variations, the purpose of their materials, and the associations that pharmacy owners and customers may have when they see them.
It is also very interesting to compare the two framed sheets of paper in **. One of them is less conspicuous and sits on a shelf behind a ceramic jar;And the other one hangs on the wall, which is very eye-catching. Both convey important information to those who enter the store – the business license on the left, printed with a few short words, and a logo on the top right of the paper, all indicate that the store exists in a political system of industrial and commercial market regulation and certification, which is legal, which reassures visitors of the store's creditworthiness;The framed calligraphy at the top of the center provides proof of legitimacy, but this is achieved through a very different value system. The style of the font, the way the date is indicated (the tenth month of Jiashen), the red inscription on the paper, and the choice of the poem are all important factors in asserting legitimacy by quoting the literary canon of the cultural elite. The choice of poems is also based on these considerations, and in the "Quantang Poems", there is a five-character quatrain by Jia Dao (779-843), called "The Hermit Is Not Met", by Fang Baozhen (Paul M.).varsano) translates as follows:
Beneath the pines, I ask the boy
He says his master's gone to gather herbs
Only in these mountains
The clouds are so deep, I know not where
The poem shows that the master left his place of residence in search of herbs. This is a metaphor for the Taoist people seeking the elixir of life in the mountains and dense clouds in places unknown to the world. That place is in **?We don't know. In that place that the world cannot reach, there must be very important herbs that attract the master to it. The word "medicine" in the poem is a key link to the shop, but unfortunately, the word "medicine" is obscured by a broken tall plastic jar with a red lid. However, even if it does not exhibit this central feature, the quatrain plays its role – giving the pharmacy the cultural authority of Tang poetry, the Taoist mysticism of the quest for immortality, and the guarantee and hope of the hermit's search for medicine.
Thus, this image shows the practice of medicine itself: the drugs sold in pharmacies follow the prescriptions of the doctor and meet the needs of the patient. But at the same time, it also reveals the context in which such medical activities exist: a space equipped with medicinal herbs to provide consumers with access to medicines;A business network that brings together pharmaceutical products from all over the world;A material network with furniture and containers of various materials;Authorities that guarantee the legal use of medical knowledge in stores;The cultural power of a poem written in the 9th century. This poem predates this store by more than 1,000 years. Not all of the above are clearly visible, but they are undoubtedly all revealed by this **.
Of course, the notion that "the practice of * exists in context" is not new;Scholars of the history of traditional medicine in Asia and the West have long relied on context to understand the theory and practice of medicine. As far as the research covered in this book is concerned, there are two aspects that are innovative in terms of approach, namely, the global historical approach to medical commodity research, and the emphasis on the material and cultural approach to the history of medicine. Both of these are related to the wide-ranging outward expansion of the field of historical research in Western academia for at least 20 years. The global history approach requires scholars to think beyond the nation state. The nation-state has been the framework for historians' research for many reasons. Writing the history of the past is often a task associated with the political legitimacy of a country;Officially-appointed historians write the history of the past to prove the legitimacy of the present. In general, history is written from the perspective of the nation-state, as scholars often conduct their research in a single academic or linguistic context, and do not always have the will or opportunity to cross cultural and political boundaries. Even in the United States and China, the standard field of world history in many universities is understood as a unit of separation: a unit, a culture, or a civilization, such as the Mayans, the Greek and Roman civilizations, and the Srivijaya kingdom. In very different time and space, these units constitute independent worlds that can be studied separately. Kenneth Pomeranz's book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the ** of the Modern World Economy, published in 2000, has had a major impact on the teaching of history. Peng Mulan not only makes an important corrective comparison of the economic development of Western Europe and the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, but also discusses the importance of "linkage" as an object of study. His research has shown that the social and economic development of the lower Yangtze River region in the century was linked to developments in the South China Sea, Japan, the Indian Ocean, and Europe. Similarly, the growth of the British economy over the same period should be understood not only in terms of scientific discoveries and technological innovations in Britain, but also in terms of colonial expansion and access to resources in remote parts of the British Empire. Led by The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Development of the Modern World Economy, a large number of scholarly papers have emerged that question the importance of global connections and question isolated countries.
The main transportation routes of Eurasia on the map show that the field of medical history research has changed in the context of scholars' desire to understand the history of the globe rather than a single country. Topics such as the spread of epidemics, the circulation of medical knowledge, and the use of medical goods** are all well suited to study in the context of global history. As we know, infectious diseases, knowledge, and knowledge are all mobile, and they all spread widely, regardless of cultural or legal boundaries. Several essays in this book explicitly deal with the activities of people, ideas, and things across various borders. There are also articles that show another historical development that has changed the way many historians conceive their work, the so-called material turn. Of course, historians of science have been writing about matter for a long time;Medications are as important as medical devices or acupuncture point maps. However, the way scholars write has changed. In part, this is due to the fluidity of the boundaries between art history, literary studies and history, as well as between anthropology, archaeology and history, which has inspired scholars around the world to think across borders about the object of study and its carrier, to question what the "thing" is, and to think critically about the object itself and what it represents. Through these questions, the object of study itself can provide a wealth of information to historians**. In part, this is also due to the profound influence of Arjun Appadurai's writings, especially his book The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. The book encourages scholars to study "things" not as static entities with a single meaning and value, but as moving entities that repeatedly change meaning during the life cycle or biography of the object of study. Apadullet and his co-authors suggest that value (monetary, cultural, emotional, political, etc.) should be reconsidered at every point in the life of the subject. Using this approach, especially in conjunction with the global history approach, historians will find objects in a variety of fields as valid historical materials for analysis and exploration.
The ** in this book reveals in different ways the implications of the global and material turn in historical research. First of all, we see this in the research methods of drugs. Rather than treating a plant or medicine as a separate, isolated "thing," the authors approach the study from a holistic and integrated perspective that includes a complete synthesis of meanings, associations, and emotional responses. For example, Liang Qizi and Chen Ming's article on Afoetida (also known as "hing" or "asafetida") does not reduce it to a single object in a single epistemological context, but encompasses all names and meanings, and traces its transboundary activities over a long period of time. Wang Jiakui conducted a record of ancient herbal medicine from the perspectives of pharmacology and toxicology. Xu Guanmian's research on cloves takes into account the broad context of the spice, and by tracing the traces of this spice system across time and space, the history of a single "thing" can reveal broader social and political changes.
Hingiseh, or the Afoetum plant, is from several other essays in Gonbofa's Treasures of Overseas Treasures (1712), which describe the trajectories or routes of medicines and plants across political and cultural boundaries. For example, Lin and Anna He's two articles on rhubarb are not based on a single special background or knowledge framework, but on the multiple ways in which the plant was recognized both inside and outside the Chinese Empire. Lo and Rahul Markowitz conduct research across three disciplines: culture, geography and business. Roche's research on "panacea" and Markowitz's research on ginseng resulted in an enticing business proposition that stretched from North America, Southeast Asia to China. The certainty of these medical goods is less important than their quality and availability. Gao's research object, China root, is clearly associated with a place whose "exoticism" (remote and little-known origin) strongly appeals to European medical experts.
Vesalius's Brief Essays on Chinese Roots, Lyon, 1547 The view of global history also influences several other essays in this book, although their relationship to global historiography is less clear. Rather than crossing cultural boundaries to trace a single drug, these authors explore how medical thought and practice can transform within a single space where people and ideas flow. For example, Esther Helena Ahrens' research on Molu's medical market reveals a changing world where knowledge from special places is widely disseminated outside of this region, such as Ambon. Samir Boumedin's article shows how Chinese knowledge of Materia Medica entered the intellectual framework of Europeans through the efforts of the Jesuits. As Claire Griffin puts it, the "exoticism" that emerged in the Russian medical market in the early modern period changed something more than medical practice: it changed people's perception of the wider world. The contrast between the early modern world and the modern world reveals the obvious similarities here. During World War II, and in Taiwan in the 50s of the 20th century, as Chang Shuqing and Pi Guoguo argued, the spread of "Western" knowledge provided a new medical system for the population of Chinese mainland and Taiwan, while stimulating their desire to return to traditional Chinese practices. As Liu Shiyong and Zheng Hong argue, the global circulation of medical products and expertise has given new recognition to ancient, alternative and "folk" knowledge. Finally, Xu Yuan and Zhou Yingjie provide a new way to understand medical knowledge transmitted through texts. Using digital humanities tools, they analyzed the Materia Medica found in early Buddhist and Taoist texts and argued that this knowledge was prevalent across genres and religious denominations. Even without direct reference to global history or material historiography, their** shows that digital humanities tools can provide new avenues for the study of medical history. The earliest religious texts they analyzed date back to the Six Dynasties period (222-589).
The articles included in this book, as well as Piero Crassati's ** that we used at the beginning of this article, show that the future of the field of medical history requires not only a global historical study of material culture, but also the exploration of new methods of historical data and numerical analytic analysis. Only then can we truly trace the global travel footprint of Materia Medica.
This article is the preface to the book "The Global Story of Materia Medica: The Production of Medicine, ** and Health Knowledge in the Global Market since the 5th Century".
"The Global Story of Materia Medica: Drugs on the Global Market since the 5th Century".** and Health Knowledge ProductionGao Xi, [Dutch] He Anna Editor-in-Chief Simplified Horizontal Row 32 Open Hardcover 978710116291210800Introduction
This book brings together the cutting-edge academic achievements of 18 outstanding scholars and academic rookies in the field of global medical history, with the global history of Materia Medica as the main line, tracking more than 1,600 years of long-term and cross-regional pharmaceutical products, such as rhubarb, aferul, ginseng, cloves, Chinese roots, cinchona, etc., and showing the relationship between ** and global pharmaceutical product circulation and health knowledge production from multiple dimensions at the political, economic, cultural and social levels. Two innovations have been made in Fang**, namely the method of global history and the method of material culture history. The future of the field of medical history requires not only the study of global history of material culture, but also the exploration of new methods of historical data and digital simulation. This book is a good example of tracing the global travel footprint of Materia Medica.
About the Author
Gao Xi is a Ph.D. in History at Fudan University, a professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of History at Fudan University, a visiting researcher at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, an executive director of the Chinese Society for the History of Science and Technology, and the deputy director of the Medical History Committee of the Chinese Society for the History of Science and Technology. He is the author of The Biography of Dezhen: A British Missionary and the Modernization of Medicine in the Late Qing Dynasty (2009), The Walker: The Biography of Wen Yumei (2021), and the editor-in-chief of Medicine and History (2020).
Anne Gerritsen holds a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick, Dean of the Department of Asian Art at Leiden University in the Netherlands, a Fellow of the British National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. He is the author of The Ji'anshi People and Local Society in China during the Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties (2007), The City of Blue and White Flowers: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (2020), and the editor-in-chief of Writing a History of Material Culture (2015), and Health and Material History of the Indian World: Medicine, Material Culture, and **, 1600-2000 (2023).
**Comments
Chinese medicine that affects the world, affects the world of Chinese medicine!The study of Materia Medica should be carried out across ancient and modern, Chinese and Western, and interdisciplinary. "Materia Medica" does exactly that.
Zhao Zhongzhen, a professor at the School of Chinese Medicine of Hong Kong Baptist University, "The Global Story of Materia Medica" overlooks the long history of the production and dissemination of Materia Medica knowledge since the 5th century, and traces the transmutation trajectory of the Materia Medica's ideological system from the naturalist tradition to the mathematical tradition. It can be described as: the global road of materia medica, spreading from east to west, opening up a new horizon of cultural integration;A healthy world view, regardless of the north and the south, carries the eternal dream across time and space.
Wang Zhenguo, a professor at Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Table of Contents
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Inside page appreciation
Editor-in-chief Gao Xi signed and sealed] Materia Medica Global Chronicle - the production of medicines, ** and health knowledge in the global market since the 5th century.
Co-ordination: One North;Editor: Siqi).