Healing with Poisons

Winner of the 2023 William H. Welch Medal, sponsored by the American Association for the History of Medicine A revealing study of risky cures in classical Chinese pharmacy At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from chills to pains to epidemics. Healing with Poisons explores the ways physicians, religious devotees, court officials, and laypeopl