内容简介

Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China’s early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy—as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine—resists easy characterization. While China’s long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rejecting narratives of intellectual stagnation or an unchanging folk culture, He Bian argues that pharmacy’s history in early modern China can best be understood as a dynamic interplay between elite and popular culture.

Beginning with decentralizing trends in book culture and fiscal policy in the sixteenth century, Bian reveals pharmacy’s central role in late Ming public discourse. Fueled by factional politics in the early 1600s, amateur investigation into pharmacology reached peak popularity among the literati on the eve of the Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. The eighteenth century witnessed a systematic reclassification of knowledge, as the Qing court turned away from pharmacopeia in favor of a demedicalized natural history. Throughout this time, growth in long-distance trade enabled the rise of urban pharmacy shops, generating new knowledge about the natural world.


He Bian is assistant professor of history and East Asian studies at Princeton University.

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豆瓣评论

  • 二大人山大人
    细读了第二章,边和延展性的写作,给写无甚相关的朝贡的我也能带来启发2021-07-26
  • 闻朵
    dissertation的原因第一时间让图书馆给我买了来,比起作者的dissertation丰富好多啊!Part 1正好对上我的research范畴,当然pharmacy不全等于本草,不敢说自己的研究还能补充什么,但希望能给其中的一些讨论添加有价值的注脚,自勉!2020-07-22
  • 尔湖
    多有启发。将本草知识放在传统理学的发展脉络之中,以明清之际为界,由于出版业的发展和本草产业的商业化,本草知识从精英文化逐渐过渡成为大众文化,从官方权威文本成为基层药材商人的共识。作者意图说明的东西太多,导致有些观点论述很少。更开心的是,本书的主要观点,与我最近设想的“鹿茸”知识的建构有相同点。最后一章,对于我所设想的“边疆医疗社会史”有很大帮助。2021-05-31

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