GLOBALISATION INTERRUPTED? THE CASE OF OPIUM IN THE SPREAD OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE IN MING DYNASTY CHINA (original) (raw)

2014 Drugs, Destiny, and Disease in Medieval China: Situating Knowledge in Context

Daoism: Religion, History, Society, 2014

This paper examines the therapeutic use of drugs and ritual as recorded in a 4th-century scripture and the ways different notions of destiny affected treatment. It also offers methodological considerations of the ways contemporary scholarship has separated medicine and religion as discrete fields in early imperial China, and proposes methods for closer engagement with these early materials. A standing theory in the field argues that because rituals of confession and therapeutic drugs were understood to operate on different principles, these two interventions were mutually exclusive. Confessional rituals relied on a moral accounting system and manipulated one’s “count” of allotted life, whereas drugs simply worked empirically, and therefore disrupted the ritual accounting system. The author investigates this theory by reading the Zhen’gao 真誥 (DZ1016), as an ethnographic source, one of the best of the period. It was also an important source used by proponents of the argument outlined above. Comparison of different revelations indicates that, contrary to the above findings, drugs and ritual were used together over time to treat the same people with the same complaints in what appears to have been a regular protocol. The paper further describes an etiological theory in the text that connects a causal chain that crosses various domains, including ritual and drug therapy. This section of the paper concludes that the hard separation of religion and medicine imagined in earlier scholarship deserves to be reexamined on the basis of actor categories. How did the protagonists of the Zhen’gao actually organize their knowledge in practice? Looking beyond theoretical models of disease and cure, this organization is visible in the ways social and institutional practice structured the flow and hierarchy of knowledge. Rather than distinguishing between the ritual and the empirical, the protagonists of the text placed much more emphasis on differentiating the esoteric from the exoteric, secret knowledge intended only for initiates versus that circulated to the laity. Very clear distinctions mark these as two different methods of transmission, treatment styles, medical cultures and notions of disease. A concluding methodological reflection argues that attention to the situatedness of knowledge is useful for tracing the emergence of stable systems, whether religious or medical. It argues that this method reveals a two-level notion of destiny as a critical distinguishing feature of Shangqing knowledge.

A Medieval Daoist Drug Geography: The Jinye shendan jing as a novel view on the circulation of medical knowledge in Asia

Religions, 2023

This article preprint examines the intersection of religion, science, medicine and historical geography in China through a study of the Taiqing jinye shendan jing 太清金液神丹經 (Grand Clarity Scripture of Divine Elixir Made from Liquid Gold), attributed to Ge Hong 葛洪 (283-343 CE). The text provides a gaze which contravenes standard narratives of foreign medical migration that vector into China via Buddhist channels. Passages from the Scripture describe the healing powers of non-Chinese drugs, and highlight ways medieval writers imagined the transmission of medical knowledge, as well as the specific places producing potent substances. As such, we argue that it provides a novel view on medical migration in its time period. As one of the early sources on physical geography and trade goods from Southeast Asia, it is an important resource for early knowledge of the region, and is one of the earliest examples of possible Daoist religio-technical continuities between the regions.

2018 "Situating the History of Medicine within Chinese History," Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, no. 27, 163-177

The past ten years have seen the publication of more than seventy English-language monographs, edited books, translations, dictionaries, and even a three-volume catalogue, related to the history of medicine in China. Such substantive, varied, and often groundbreaking scholarship is finally starting to do justice to the complexity of the subject and the richness of the sources vis-à-vis the better known, and thus more widely taught, history of European and Anglo-American medicine from antiquity to the modern world. Collectively bringing the field of the history of medicine in China to a new level of synthesis, these works not only demonstrate how integral the history of medicine and public health is to Chinese history but also should help facilitate the integration of East Asian medical history into more broadly conceived global histories of medicine and public health. This major boon in publications on the medical history of China over the past decade also reveals the wide-ranging methods and diverse approaches scholars have chosen to frame, and thereby exert heuristic control over, what arguably has become newly visible as the contours of a vast, complex, and essential subject of not just Chinese but human history.

The History of Chinese Medicine in the People’s Republic of China and its Globalization

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal, 2008

This introductory article provides an overview over the history of Chinese medicine, as it evolved in the People's Republic of China over the last 60 years. In particular, it highlights how Traditional Chinese Medicine (zhongyi), as invented in the 1950s during a period of nationalism marked by idealism and pride in China'sancient philosophy and cultural heritage, has evolved into a medicine that thrives on the contemporary global health market in a neoliberal climate. This latter form of Chinese medicine, which the author, in accordance with its Chinese promoters, calls zhongyiyao “Chinese medicine and pharmacotherapy,” has led to a further materialization of the once scholarly medical currents of Chinese medicine. However, as this volume will show, the globalization of Chinese medicine should not merely be considered in respect of those aspects that are being sold in those niches of society that offer a cure for bodily ailments but also in respect of those that—in accordance with the way Cartesian dualism has divided health care—are increasingly consumed as aspects of preventive medicine, namely taijiquan, and qigong.

A Gift from the Buddhist Monastery: The Role of Buddhist Medical Practices in the Assimilation of the Opium Poppy in Chinese Medicine during the Song Dynasty (960–1279)

Medical History

This paper aims to critically appraise the incorporation of opium poppy into medical practice in Song-dynasty China. By analysing materia medica and formularies, along with non-medical sources from the Song period, this study sheds light on the role of Chinese Buddhist monasteries in the process of incorporation of foreign plants into Chinese medicine. It argues that Buddhist monasteries played a significant role in the evolution of the use of opium poppy in Song dynasty medicine. This is because the consumption practices in Buddhist monasteries inspired substantial changes in the medical application of the flower during the Southern Song dynasty. While, at the beginning of Song dynasty, court scholars incorporated opium poppy into official materia medica in order to treat disorders such as huangdan and xiaoke, as well as cinnabar poisoning, this study of the later Song medical treatises shows how opium poppy was repurposed to treat symptoms such as diarrhoea, coughing and spasms. ...

Narcotic Culture. A Social History of Drug Consumption in China

British Journal of Criminology, 2002

Opium and China are synonymous, yet historians have so far failed to answer one key question: why was opium rather than cannabis or coffee so eagerly consumed? This article is a preliminary exploration of the cultural significance and social uses of narcotics from the sixteenth to the midtwentieth centuries. On the basis of fresh evidence drawn from archival material and other primary sources, it highlights the social dynamics behind the huge expansion of narcotics, from opium smoking as a prestigious elite activity in the seventeenth century to the mass use of morphine in the twentieth century. 1 The authors aim to account for the rapidly changing patterns of opium consumption and establish their cultural and social determinants, and to explore the 'pre-history' of opium well before the advent of the 'Opium War' in order to explain how foreign merchants responded to indigenously generated demands. We also explode the myth of 'opium smoking' as the main consumption pattern by charting various narcotics used in twentieth-century China, from heroin pills to morphine injections. Opium as Medicine and as Poison Opium-yapian in Chinese, from the Arabic afiyun-was being imported into China from as early as the Tang period (618-907), both by sea and by caravan overland. 1 During the Ming period (1368-1644), opium occupied a reputable position within Chinese medicine. The materia medica of the Ming recommended opium as a general panacea against bowel disorders and as a general tonic (Li 1988: 2/23; Song 1999: 279-96). The Jinian liangfang ('A collection of good remedies') of 1724 cites an opium preparation as being capable of curing anything from cholera, plague, heat stroke, headache, inflammations, fever, vomiting and diarrhoea to stomach pains (Nian 1724: 1). Other opium remedies were also used in accordance with Chinese medical tradition, i.e. for controlling bodily fluids and preserving vital energy, for warming the kidneys, muscles and joints, treating colds, arthritis and stomach pains (Nian 1724: 1-2). Some observers also recognized its lethal properties, encapsulated by the term du, or 'poison' (Ma 1994: 317

History of Chinese Medicine

This course surveys Chinese medical history from antiquity to the present. It starts with a look at Chinese medicine in the contemporary world, exploring its unique features, diverse practices, and debated efficacy. It then goes back to history, studying the foundational ideas in Chinese medicine and their evolution over time. Particular attention will be directed to the perception of illness, the body, and medicinal substances. Furthermore, it explores the diverse and miscellaneous practices of Chinese medicine in society through the lens of religious healing, state regulation, medical practitioners, gender and sexuality, and its interplay with the world. Finally, it examines in the more recent past how Chinese medicine interacted with Western medicine and how it reinvented itself during this contested process. Overall, this course seeks to not only enrich our understanding of Chinese medicine in the past, but also utilize historical knowledge to illuminate our ways of living today.