Date of Award
5-12-2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
History
Advisor(s)
Norman Kutcher
Subject Categories
Arts and Humanities | History
Abstract
This dissertation explores the philosophical and socioeconomic context of late imperial Chinese pharmacology and medical therapies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It examines the rise of human-derived drugs (renyao) in the sixteenth century and their subsequent decline in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, influenced by a complex interplay of changes in social mores, urban tastes, commercial publishing, and philosophical ideologies. By drawing from a diverse range of sources including bencao (materia medica) works, formularies, Daoist texts, government documents, biji (belles lettres), novels, collected verses, and local gazetteers, the dissertation argues that Chinese medical culture in the Ming and Qing periods underwent a transformation and reformation driven by political, socioeconomic, and epistemic factors. Following earlier fashions for elixirs and aphrodisiacs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Chinese pharmaceutical culture in the elite circles grew increasingly more pragmatic. The shift away from human-derived drugs in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries marked a new priority to distinguishing between drugs whose derivation harmed the donor, and those that did not. This permitted certain categories of human-derived drugs to persist and take on scientific foundation, while others receded into the realm of folklore and myth. This research underscores that it was beginning in the Ming dynasty that the use of renyao became highly popular in Chinese society in the sixteenth century. However, by the early Qing dynasty, and in particular the seventeenth century, it was increasingly shunned by many. During this time discourses were vague on the distinction between human-derived drugs that caused harm to the donor and those that did not. Substances such as human hair, fingernails, and feces could be harmlessly collected, while the collection of human tissue harmed and even threatened the life of the donor. Some practices were particularly brutal and harmful to human donors, both physically and mentally. With these findings, this dissertation reveals a great deal about the changing medical standards and ethical principles during the transitional period in late imperial China. Marginalized drugs had a profound impact on late imperial China’s politics, society, and culture. Changes in early modern Chinese perceptions of medicine, diseases, and drugs were affected and in turn impacted the social and cultural transformations of people’s bodily experience and daily life in the late Ming and early Qing periods. The rise of renyao in the Ming and its decline in the early Qing elite circle show that premodern Chinese medicine had the intrinsic impetus and epistemological resources for innovation. Although the diffusion and proliferation of renyao impeded the thorough standardization of medical knowledge that Ming-Qing physicians and medical writers initiated, the fall of these controversial drugs is representative of a pragmatic turn in medical discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of China.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Cheng, Erqi, "Curing Bodies with Bodies: Renyao (Human-derived Drugs) in Late Imperial China" (2024). Dissertations - ALL. 1948.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1948
