History of Western Pharmacy in China

This book covers the first century of China's opening-up to the outside world from 1840 and its opportunities and challenges in the adoption of science and technology, specifically focusing on modern advances in pharmacy and pharmaceutics. It demarcates the historical transformation of the traditional art of healing by replacing materia medica with that of chemical drugs, a process catalyzed by medial missionaries, ship surgeons, entrepreneurial western chemists and druggists, and, of equally importance, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) pharmacy owners. The book surveys the impact of medical and pharmaceutical technologies in Europe and the North America, including quinine, opium substitutes, santonin, laughing gas, 606, insulin, penicillin, and so on, as they introduced by medical missionaries and enterprising drug merchants to the treaty ports and urban centers in China. As a trading hub and trans-shipment center in the late nineteenth century, import houses such as A.S. Watson, Koeffer Dispensary, and Jardine Matheson served as some of the early drivers in the rapid transmission of western medicines to the East. The book also addresses the motivational factors for enterprising TCM pharmacy owners to enter the western retail and wholesale drug market. It charts the introduction of best practice management in clinical pharmacy, zero tolerance in dispensing mistakes, publication of hospital formularies, control of poisons and dangerous drugs, and the other many measures implemented by colonial pharmacists. The book presents an otherwise underrepresented understanding of this complex period of the rise of western medicines in China. It is presented as an explorative narrative rather than an analytical history to effectively tell the story of western pharmacy in China. It is distinctly a pharmaceutical history, rather than a social or cultural history. It is of interest to scholars in the history of medicine, its East-West intersections, and in the history and evolution of contemporary pharmacy, in particular.