By tracing substances from their roots to how they’re used today, a team including Hsiao-Wen Cheng of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations aims to answer questions about how medical practices evolve.
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How did the cures that are commonly relied on—pain reliever for a headache, cough medicine to ease a hack—become part of modern medicine? And how does something move from a raw material to an important healing tool? These are questions Hsiao-Wen Cheng and colleagues are aiming to answer in a unique way: by tracing individual substances from their historical origins to how they’re used today.
“We realized that by going through this process, you can travel through time and space with these materials,” says Cheng, an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.
The project, which will eventually publish as an edited volume with each chapter focused on a different drug, started as part of a 2022 conference at Penn that Cheng co-organized. The overall topic was centered around the history of medicine; Cheng recalls the team wanted to do something different than what a standard meeting might entail. They decided that each participating academic would select a single drug or ingredient, then follow its path back through history—however long and winding it might be.
Cheng says the exercise was so successful it led to deeper questions about what makes something a medicine, as well as how society decides whether that medicine is good or authentic. “We really started paying attention to the materiality of the drugs we were tracing,” Cheng says. From there, the larger book idea evolved, spurred by financial support from the Penn Global Research & Engagement Grant Program.
The resulting anthology, “The Global Lives of Medicines: Materials, Markets, and Healing Practices Across Asia,” will likely publish sometime in 2026. But the work—what Cheng and her collaborators describe as “twelve biographies of medicinal substances in Asian history”—has been underway for some time. The volume will cover a range of materials, like aconite (used for improving circulation and helping with pain) and leeches (for bloodletting). Each case study, the authors write in their intro, intends to highlight “the ways in which Asian medical traditions overlap, intersect, and circulate across regions and historical periods.”
This story is by Michele W. Berger. Read more at Omnia.
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