Seventy-Two Ways of Saving Lives: Folk Remedies in Old China - Hardcover

by Ronald Suleski (Author), Shigehisa Kuriyama (Foreword by)

How did lay people in old China save their lives when dealing with acute or chronic health issues? Conventional medicine was costly and might not have been an option for many. Instead, people in villages and towns relied on remedies drawn from a woodblock-printed illustrated booklet called the Seventy-Two Therapies, first published in 1847.

The goal of this book is to foster an appreciation of China's long tradition of folk remedies. Each folk remedy is illustrated by a page from the circa 1860s woodblock edition of the Seventy-Two Therapies which the author used for translation. He also added a historical and interpretive analysis to expand on each therapy and to place it in the context of contemporary thinking, aiming at academics and readers interested in the everyday lives of common people in pre-1950 China, and in the folk medicine wisdom inherited from the past.

Author Biography

Ronald Suleski was Assistant Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. He is serving as Director of the Rosenberg Institute for East Asian Studies at Suffolk University Boston.

Shigehisa Kuriyama is Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University.