• Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Global Lives of Medicines: Materials, Markets, and Healing Practices Across Asia

Global Lives of Medicines: Materials, Markets, and Healing Practices Across Asia

Hardcover

Medical ReferenceGeneral Asian HistoryGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

PREORDER - Expected ship date March 2, 2027

ISBN10: 0295755504
ISBN13: 9780295755502
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: Mar 2 2027
Pages: 304
Language: English

Medicines travel, transform, and multiply meanings across Asia's markets, temples, texts, and bodies

What 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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

General Asian History