This CAREER project, which is funded by NSF's Science, Technology and Society program, is a study of the roles of imperial expansion and global exchange in the 14th-19th centuries in shaping Chinese medical and pharmaceutical history. It will provide a rich understanding of the way global trade, state expansion, and local practices transformed foreign medicine into the ethnic minority medicine of modern China, and ultimately into the Chinese and alternative medicines of today. Understanding how local practices and textual traditions formed early modern pharmaceutical knowledge will provide a richer context for understanding the practice and theory of current alternative medical theories, drugs, and techniques in the United States and beyond.
The project has three primary research objectives. First is to study the history of the exchange of medical goods and knowledge between China and the Islamic world. Second, is to investigate the media of transmission (including recipes, dictionaries, geographic works, images, and sensations) that enabled scientific and medical exchange between the Chinese empire and various cultural groups (including Tibetan, Arabo-Persian, and Mongol) on the imperial borderlands. Third is a theoretical investigation of the ways that such media, and the constructed geography of the pharmacy, continue to shape medical knowledge in a transnational context
The specific educational objectives of this project includes the creation of interdisciplinary courses and seminars in global science and medicine for undergraduate, graduate, and medical students, including new courses devoted to Science on the Silk Roads and Drugs and Environment in China and the World. It also includes. The development of new pedagogical materials and techniques for sharing these educational opportunities beyond the university, including workshops, public science literature, and internet resources for teaching and studying silk road science and medicine
Early modern Chinese medicine and pharmacy developed in the context of imperial expansion and exchange across the Chinese borderlands and in the global market. This history is profoundly important for re-thinking current issues of environmental policy and regulation, public education in science and medicine, and the global pharmaceutical trade. By refocusing the history of East Asian science and medicine from simple nation-state centered history toward a more expansive study of Eurasian networks and movements as units of analysis, this project hopes to change how Chinese science, herbal medicine and their histories are understood, taught, and used. The project is also designed to help scholars and the public better understand the role of national identity-formation in the global scientific and medical marketplace of the future.
