Yan Liu, Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China.

Yan Liu's book, "Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China," explores the transformation of toxic substances into healing materia medica in medieval China. Liu examines the historical materiality of these substances and their use by doctors, elites, the state, and practitioners of Buddhism and Daoism. The book challenges narratives that describe Chinese herbal remedies as "natural, mild, and safe," and highlights the complex structures of knowledge production and practices in medicine, religion, and scholarship. The book is divided into three parts, covering the classification and preparation of materia medica, the people involved in knowledge production, and the radical uses of potent substances as psychotic drugs and immortality elixirs. Historians of Chinese medicine will find the book well-researched and useful, while practitioners may appreciate the historical narrative that informs their practice. The book also provides contextualization of key concepts underlying notions of the body throughout history, such as the multivalent meanings of qi. [Extracted from the article]