Global Lives of Medicines

Materials, Markets, and Healing Practices across Asia

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

1 750 kr

Kommande

Beskrivning

Medicines travel, transform, and multiply meanings across Asia’s markets, temples, texts, and bodiesWhat makes something a medicine? To answer this deceptively simple question, Global Lives of Medicines offers twelve richly detailed biographies of medicinal substances across Asian history. From ginseng and frankincense to aconite, radish, and live leeches, contributors trace how materials moved through markets, temples, courts, homes, and laboratories while continually acquiring new meanings and uses.Across the chapters, familiar categories begin to dissolve. Substances may function simultaneously as food, poison, ritual tool, or sacred object. Healing agents may be plant roots, minerals, aromatics, or even living creatures. Through these diverse case studies spanning East and South Asia, Global Lives of Medicines demonstrates how the boundaries between medicine, technology, religion, and commerce were constantly negotiated in different historical contexts. By placing these biographies in dialogue, it offers a new approach to the history of medicine—one that foregrounds the materiality, mobility, and cultural transformation of therapeutic substances across Asia.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-11-17
Mått:152 x 229 x undefined mm
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:304
Förlag:University of Washington Press
ISBN:9780295755502

Utforska kategorier

Etnicitet inom Samhälle och politik
Medicinhistoria inom Medicin
Asiens historia inom Historia och arkeologi

Mer om författaren

Hsiao-wen Cheng is associate professor of Chinese history and religion at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Divine, Demonic, and Disordered: Women Without Men in Song Dynasty China. Yan Liu is associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and author of Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China. Ng Wee-Siang Margaret is associate professor of history at the College of Wooster.