(1 reviews) Author: ISBN : 9780674035294 New from $40.00 Format: PDFThis is the story of a Chinese doctor, his book, and the creatures that danced within its pages. The Monkey and the Inkpot introduces natural history in sixteenth-century China through the iconic Bencao gangmu (Systematic materia medica) of Li Shizhen (1518–1593).
The encyclopedic Bencao gangmu is widely lauded as a classic embodiment of pre-modern Chinese medical thought. In the first book-length study in English of Li’s text, Carla Nappi reveals a “cabinet of curiosities” of gems, beasts, and oddities whose author was devoted to using natural history to guide the application of natural and artificial objects as medical drugs. Nappi examines the making of facts and weighing of evidence in a massive collection where tales of wildmen and dragons were recorded alongside recipes for ginseng and peonies.
Nappi challenges the idea of a monolithic tradition of Chinese herbal medicine by showing the importance of debate and disagreement in early modern scholarly and medical culture. The Monkey and the Inkpot also illuminates the modern fate of a book that continues to shape alternative healing practices, global pharmaceutical markets, and Chinese culture.
- Hardcover: 250 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0674035291
- ISBN-13: 978-0674035294
- Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 6.3 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China PDF
Carla Nappi's book is a charming, literate, and thoroughly informed long essay on Li Shizhen's Bencao Gangmu (Basic Herbal), the great Chinese herbal published in 1596 and still the standard reference for Chinese herbal medicine. Li's book was probably the greatest single botanical work in the world of its time, though the west soon surpassed it (in the works of Parkinson, Ray, Tournefort and many others). Georges Metailie once took me to task for calling it the greatest premodern herbal, not realizing I was using "modern" in the historian's sense of anything after 1600 or so--he thought I was referring to post-1900. Well, now Carla Nappi has pushed modernity back to include Li in "Early Modern China"! Maybe not quite. Anyway, this is a highly authoritative and accurate guide to the book--emphasizing things strange and wondrous, to be sure, and rather short-counting the everyday uses of pear syrup for sore throats, sagebrush for worms, and other everyday practical medicine. Most of the book is more or less practical lore of this sort, but the reader may be inclined to gravitate toward the dragons, phoenices, wild women, and other improbable characters that Li covered. Dr. Nappi, however, is very good about emphasizing Li's skeptical stance and fondness for verifying everything. Li was properly doubtful of the more obviously folkloric things he heard; he included them in the book, but with varying degrees of cautionary notes (someone should do a thorough study of those some day).
The real scholarship in this book is buried in the footnotes. Most unfortunately, there is no bibliography, so if you need a reference you have to get out a microscope and hunt through almost 50 pages of notes "in characters [or letters] as small as a fly's head" (to use a Chinese expression).
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