Taken from Nature: Sino-British Medical Encounters in the Early Modern Period
Open Access
- Author:
- Zhang, Miaosi
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 22, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Daniel Chapin Beaver, Committee Member
Kathlene T Baldanza, Committee Member
Erica Fox Brindley, Outside Member
Michael Edward Kulikowski, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- cultural encounters
exotic remedies
botanical commodities
commodification of medicine
consuming experience
medical knowledge - Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the exchange of medicinal plants and medical practices between China and Britain in the early modern period. Using knowledge of materia medica such as tea, rhubarb, china root, and camphor as the entry point and drawing on archival and primary source materials collected in Britain and China and in Chinese and English, I show that scientific and medical research was inextricably bound up with commercial interests for the British Empire. Missionaries and explorers introduced China’s achievements in medicine and its practitioners’ rich knowledge in materia medica to European audience. The long-term trade routes led European merchants, physicians, and apothecaries into the global intellectual pursuit of medical botany. All of these contributed to competitive voices in creating, circulating, and consuming knowledge related to materia medica and medical practice from China. The appropriation of Chinese medicinal plants in early-modern England was forged through the creation of scholarly, commercial, and cultural discourses on the commodities. This particular mode of transmission was significant to understand the conflicts between the prerequisite knowledge through texts and the actual experience of consuming the commodities in the commodification of exotic remedies in early-modern England. The process also revealed that, learned physicians and domestic practitioners were equally crucial to the appropriation of exotic remedies. Learned physicians served as intermediaries between lay practitioners and exotic ingredients by accommodating these exotic herbs in through vernacular medical writings. Domestic practitioners, enforcing these remedies in daily life, made them part of early-modern English medical culture.