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Healing with Poisons

Potent Medicines in Medieval China

By Yan Liu

Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749013

At first glance, medicine and poison might seem to be opposites. But in China’s formative era of pharmacy (200–800 CE), poisons were strategically deployed as healing agents to cure everything from...

The Empress in the Pepper Chamber

Zhao Feiyan in History and Fiction

By Olivia Milburn

Zhao Feiyan (45–1 BCE), the second empress appointed by Emperor Cheng of the Han dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE), was born in slavery and trained in the performing arts, a background that made her appointment as...