The Social Lives of Drugs: Making, Circulating, and Consuming medicines in Late Imperial China

My dissertation follows the social life of drugs in late imperial China, specifically the process of making, circulating, and consuming that made the drugs meaningful. I will investigate the drugs as “fluid” objects, whose therapeutic value was constituted by the specific cultural system and social practices. Drugs in late imperial Chinese society, as I will demonstrate in the research, embody both the natural endowed curative potency and the transforming power of human labor. It transcends different social settings including pharmaceutical workshops, pharmacies, clinical encounters, and everyday health care practices, where its curative power was transformed, advertised, contested, and experienced. In this regard, the social life of drugs also illuminates the social life of the people and their entanglement with things — how did the practitioners and laypeople perceived and embodied the efficacy of drugs and its correlations with the human body? How did physicians and pharmacists make and prescribe drugs in light of the new knowledge about natural things and human diseases? How did people use the drugs as an everyday approach to tackle with health problems? How did practitioners and patients contest the usage of drugs in clinical settings? The answers to these questions can contribute to a deeper understanding of the medical culture and social conditions in late imperial China.