Experiments Under Pressure: Chinese Materia Medica and the Making of Modern Pharmacology in China, 1920s–1970s
Yuqi Zhang’s project examines how modern pharmacological knowledge was produced through sustained efforts to mine Chinese materia medica for the development of new drugs, from the Republican era to the early People’s Republic of China (1920s–1970s).
How did Chinese scientists trained in chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine select, prepare, and test natural substances long used in clinical practice? Situating these experimental practices across Republican China, wartime mobilization, and early socialist state-building and Cold War alliances, the project explores how war and revolution created conditions of pressure that shaped research agendas, experimental standards, and scientific authority.
Bringing together the history of medicine in modern China with the history of modern pharmacology, this project conceptualizes pharmacological experimentation as a form of scientific translation grounded in material practices, dependent on infrastructure, and shaped by historically contingencies.
Yuqi holds a BA in Visual Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in East Asian Regional Studies from Columbia University. Her master’s thesis examined the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary China through the lens of clinical labor. Before joining the IMPRS, she spent four years working as a journalist and as a program officer at an NGO in Beijing.
Image 1: Pages from Ben li tang chong ding Ben cao gang mu (本立堂重訂本草綱目), featuring multiple recipes using qinghao (page 18b, juan fifteen) and pictures of four plants, including hao cao (page 31a, juan one) © Collection of Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Image 2: Wellcome Brand Ephedrine Isotonic Solution (Aqueous), a commercial ephedrine preparation manufactured between 1940 and 1964 © National Museum of American History; Record ID: nmah_718975.
Image 3: “Classification of Chinese Materia Medica by Therapeutic Effects,” appendix to Modern Research on Chinese Materia Medica, p. 201 © Zhang Changshao, Modern Research on Chinese Materia Medica (现代的中药研究). Shanghai: Science and Technology Press, 1956.