It is almost a consensus among historians that Bencao gangmu (Systematic Materia Medica), written by Li Shizhen (1518–93) and first printed in 1596, represented one of the highest achievements of pharmacy in late imperial China. Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, for example, ended their survey of Chinese botany with Li's work.Footnote ¹ However, Li Shizhen was not the only author who wrote about bencao (materia medica) in the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods. A total of 240 bencao texts emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians, however, tend to dismiss these works as merely rearranging past insights (p. 11). In Know Your Remedies, He Bian compellingly demonstrates that they merit close academic attention. These bencao texts help us better understand the interplay between state, society, commerce, and the learned community in Ming and Qing times.

Divided into two parts of three chapters each, Know Your Remedies delineates the development of pharmacy in late imperial China, following a clear chronological order. Part one focuses on how two key developments shaped the contours of bencao study in the Ming. On the one hand, the Ming court stopped sponsoring the compilation of bencao texts; the decline of state-commissioned pharmacopoeia dates back to the Northern Song in the eleventh century. On the other hand, while the Ming state retreated from the field of bencao, the learned community in Jiangnan (Lower Yangzi region) developed a deeper interest in pharmacy thanks to innovations in medical learning and neo-Confucian scholarship. Ming literati embraced the idea that the study of drugs was an essential part of an inquiry into the nature of things. Late Ming scholar Miao Xiyong (ca. 1546–1627), for example, relied on classical medical texts, neo-Confucian natural philosophy, and religious ideas to find out “why drugs work the way they do” (p. 88).

Part two demonstrates how pharmacology gradually lost its status as a respected subject of study for the learned community in Qing China. Developments within neo-Confucian scholarship and the implementation of the Qing state's cultural policy contributed to the decline. The field of pharmacology nonetheless expanded and diversified in the Qing, thanks to changes brought about by the burgeoning materia medica market and long-distance pharmaceutical trade. As a result, authors who were on the margin of the learned community could incorporate such vernacular sources as “local herbalists’ recipes” into their bencao works (p. 157).

Know Your Remedies deepens our understanding of the history of medicine and science in late imperial China. It epitomizes the efforts of historians to pivot away from the so-called Needham question, which tried to determine the point in time when the Western civilization overtook that of China (p. 10). Needham and his collaborators concluded that the early 1600s marked the time when the West gained superiority over China, where scientific development stagnated. However, Bian demonstrates that pharmacy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China was a vibrant and evolving field. A diverse group of people, including learned scholars, pharmacists, merchants, and even amateurs, all contributed to the production of pharmaceutical knowledge.

This book's focus on pharmacology also provides a vantage point from which to reveal the evolving relationship between medicine and Confucian scholarship during the Ming-Qing transition. Neo-Confucian learning converged with medical study in the late Ming. In the decades after the Manchu conquest of 1644, interest in bencao persisted among the literati in Jiangnan (p. 109). However, neo-Confucian scholars changed how they thought about the nature of drugs in Qing China. As a result, the boundaries between Confucian scholarship and medical learning hardened in the first decades of the eighteenth century.

Among the many merits of Know Your Remedies, its use of sources is particularly laudable. Bian examines and integrates a wide array of primary sources, including bencao texts, local gazetteers, state-issued documents, and scholar-officials’ essay anthologies. Bian is thus able to provide biographical information for each bencao author and situates them in historical context. For example, her focus on Qing scholar Zhao Xuemin (ca. 1715–1809) illustrates how pharmacy became a sphere in which elite culture converged with popular culture. While narrating Zhao's vivid life story, Bian highlights how contemporary circumstances such as the commodification of materia medica and Qing consumers’ increasing curiosity for exotic goods shaped Zhao's approach to studying and writing about bencao.

Know Your Remedies successfully situates the development of pharmacy as a field of study in China's epistemic tradition and uncovers the voices of previously ignored authors of late Ming and Qing bencao texts. It provides an innovative model for scholars who want to take a transdynastic approach to the study of late imperial China. Readers interested in the Ming and Qing will find this monograph especially inspiring. In addition to historians of China, this deeply researched and insightful book will also be of help for specialists in the history of early modern science and medicine.