Why read Healing with Poisons?

Healing with Poisons

Book description

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…

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Asian history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Healing with Poisons as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Olivia Milburn

Author

People often have the idea that traditional medicines and herbs are a gentle, natural way of solving health problems, and that chemotherapy is a modern, Western invention... but not at all! This book charts the use of seriously toxic compounds in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in medieval times, to demonstrate that substances like arsenic and aconite have long had a really important place in medical practice. This is an eye-opening book, which serves to demonstrate that very toxic substances have been to fight cancer and other horrible conditions within TCM for more than fifteen centuries, and "natural" doesn't necessarily mean…

From Olivia's 3 favorite reads in 2024.