Di Lu – författare

This book explores British scientific engagement with fungi during the eighteenth century. Bridging the history of science, technology, medicine, and material culture, it sheds light on how the Age of Reason sought to unveil and conquer the fungal world.As the first scholarly monograph to explore the intersection of fungi or mushrooms and science in the British Enlightenment, this book presents five thematic case studies. It begins by investigating the ‘Mushroom Stone’ and its transition from an object of ‘natural magic’ to an object of empirical study. It then explores the cross-channel influence of French horticultural techniques on the nascent British mushroom industry, alongside the medical controversies surrounding the ‘agaric of the oak’ as a surgical haemostatic. The latter half of the book focuses on the formalisation of mycology, providing a comparative analysis of James Bolton and James Sowerby, whose illustrated texts brought Linnaean order to British fungi. Finally, it examines the ‘fairy ring’ phenomenon, revealing public participation in natural history and the demystification of these local formations. Together, these chapters reveal how fungi were transformed from botanical puzzles into catalysts of scientific research.This book is primarily aimed at historians of science and modern Britain; researchers in biological taxonomy and mycology; and students or general readers with an interest in natural history, history of science, or British history.

This book explores the dissemination of knowledge around Chinese medicinal substances from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in a global context. The author presents a microhistory of the caterpillar fungus, a natural, medicinal substance initially used by Tibetans no later than the fifteenth century and later assimilated into Chinese materia medica from the eighteenth century onwards. Tracing the transmission of the caterpillar fungus from China to France, Britain, Russia and Japan, the book investigates the tensions that existed between prevailing Chinese knowledge and new European ideas about the caterpillar fungus. Emerging in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, these ideas eventually reached communities of scientists, physicians and other intellectuals in Japan and China. Seeking to examine why the caterpillar fungus engaged the attention of so many scientific communities across the globe, the author offers a transnational perspective on the making of modern Europeannatural history and Chinese materia medica.