Abstract:            

My talk takes the sub-title of my book, which is the first history of how and why Chinese state medicine expanded the use and status of animal-based drugs in the modern period.  Medicinal animals have in some sense become the ‘Achille’s heel’ of TCM in the last few decades, in that they’ve brought that health domain into conflict with wildlife conservation, and more recently efforts to stem zoonotic disease.  But historians have until recently shied away from the topic of zootherapies, leaving a huge gap in our understanding of their role in TCM’s rise as a state medicine, and in what Pordie and Hardon have called “Asian Industrial Medicine” with global reach and influence.  My talk will describe my previous published research in this area, but also introduce a grant project I’m directing to expand our historical understanding of this phenomenon to a regional scale throughout East and Southeast Asia.  

Biography:         

Dr. Liz P.Y. CHEE is Senior Research Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) and a Lecturer at Tembusu College, both at the National University of Singapore (NUS).  She was the first graduate of the Edinburgh University-NUS Joint PhD Program (History/STS) and holds an MA in History and a BA (Honors) in Japanese Studies from NUS. Her monograph Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China was published in 2021 by Duke University Press, and her work has appeared in such journals as Urban Studies and Science, Technology and Society.  Her research centers on the history of medicine and pharmaceutics in modern China, and particularly the medicalization of animals.  As Co-PI on the grant “History and Sustainability of Animal-Based Drugs in Asian Traditional Medicines”, she will be heading a large team of researchers over the next three years to historicize zootherapies in East and Southeast Asia, and understand their relation to the wildlife trade and zoonotic disease, among other elements of human/animal interaction.