Wahrig Bettina
Abteilung für Pharmazie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Technische Universität Braunschweig.
Ber Wiss. 2024 Dec;47(4):396-417. doi: 10.1002/bewi.202400004. Epub 2024 Nov 21.
This paper was prompted by some striking similarities between both the ritual and the medical use of placenta in Ming China and in premodern Europe. Contrary to most accounts, which focus either on the rise of chemiatric medicine or on the growing interest in "exotic" substances, the seventeenth century in Europe also reveals a revived interest in substances from animals, including materials from human bodies. The paper will analyse the use of words signifying the placenta, and follow the trace of vernacular knowledge about the placenta and its role in birth-giving, and in medieval medical texts on women's medicine. I will then analyse how the placenta is treated in systems of signatures in the age of alchemy and will try to trace the advent of more complicated preparations in the seventeenth century, and how between the eighteenth and the twenty-first century, the placenta meandered between a token of folk medicine (re)productive material and pharmaceutical resource.
本文源于中国明代和近代欧洲胎盘在仪式与医学用途上的一些惊人相似之处。与大多数关注化学医学兴起或对“外来”物质兴趣日增的说法不同，17世纪的欧洲对来自动物的物质，包括人体材料，也表现出了复兴的兴趣。本文将分析表示胎盘的词汇用法，追溯关于胎盘及其在分娩中的作用的民间知识，以及中世纪女性医学文本中的相关内容。然后，我将分析炼金术时代的表征体系中胎盘是如何被对待的，并试图追溯17世纪更复杂制剂的出现，以及18世纪至21世纪期间，胎盘如何在民间药物（生殖）材料和药物资源之间徘徊。
