Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China’s early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy. In the history of science and civilization in China, pharmacy—as a commercial enterprise and as a branch of classical medicine—resists easy characterization. While China’s long tradition of documenting the natural world through state-commissioned pharmacopeias, known as bencao, dwindled after the sixteenth century, the ubiquitous presence of Chinese pharmacy shops around the world today testifies to the vitality of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Rejecting narratives of intellectual stagnation or an unchanging folk culture, He Bian argues that pharmacy’s history in early modern China can best be understood as a dynamic interplay between elite and popular culture.
Beginning with decentralizing trends in book culture and fiscal policy in the sixteenth century, Bian reveals pharmacy’s central role in late Ming public discourse. Fueled by factional politics in the early 1600s, amateur investigation into pharmacology reached peak popularity among the literati on the eve of the Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century. The eighteenth century witnessed a systematic reclassification of knowledge, as the Qing court turned away from pharmacopeia in favor of a demedicalized natural history. Throughout this time, growth in long-distance trade enabled the rise of urban pharmacy shops, generating new knowledge about the natural world.

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本书凝结了著者近二十年来近世医疗社会史研究的心得，侧重考察医学知识的建构与传播、医疗制度与资源的发展、疾病观念的变化与社会的关系。著者跳出传统的医史研究，试图发掘医疗史与近世中国社会与文化历史息息相关的历史。由于医学知识的传播，不同社会阶层所获得的医疗资源也相当丰富，其中女性作为医疗者的角色不容忽视。另一方面，明清以来国人对各类疾病与疗法的观念也随着上述的变化而改变。近世中国医疗史所呈现的社会理性，与近代西方所呈现者并不相同，中西医的相遇与融合，激荡出色彩纷呈的社会文化意涵。这一融合的过程，至今依然在持续。
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Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries.