时间：2025年6月19日 15:00—17:00
地点：清华大学人文楼B206
主题：Erasing Local Names from Chinese Materia Medica Archives: Examples from the Database Project with Chinese Historical Healthcare Manuscripts (CHHM) of the Unschuld Collection, and from Ethno-historical Fieldwork about Daoist Medicines
主讲人：Lena Springer (King's College London, Department for Theology and Religious Studies)
讲座摘要
To use names, it is crucial to minimise local variants. Therefore, scientific taxonomy establishes and updates accepted names for, e.g., useful plants. Ethno-pharmaceuticals such as traditional Chinese medicines serve as examples to show how, in addition to botanical names, different kinds of names can be recorded and integrated. Li Shizhen’s early modern Encyclopedia of Materia Medica is a masterpiece of this field of science. This talk presents examples from a database project at Charité Berlin about taste-active compounds based on the Unschuld Collection of Chinese Historical Healthcare Manuscripts. Names for drugs give their sources and regional origins, properties and actions in different languages and from different scientific disciplines. It is crucial to take different users and different processes of integration into account to identify the drugs. To this end, fieldwork about Daoist medicines in the region around Mount Taibai will close the talk to underline that even translocal names confront fragmented historical records of constantly updated scientific and historical materia media surveys.
主讲人简介
Lena Springer gained her D. Phil. in Sinology from the University of Vienna, with research focusing upon the transmission of medical and scientific heritage in China. She is currently a Research Associate in the History and Philosophy of Science with the ERC-funded Cosmological Visionaries project based out of the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at King’s College London. Lena’s current research focuses upon traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and indigenous knowledge in Western China. She is developing a biographical and translocal approach to shifts and changes in Han-centred medical practice based on the memories of senior Chinese medicine doctors. Her ethnographic search on apothecaries has taken her deep into the histories of materia medica science in Western China.
Lena publishes on indigenous knowledge, ethnographic archivers and medical-history-writers in China, spatial and social migration to Europe, and the anthropology of science. Her research was supported by funders in the UK and US, China, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, and the EU.
As a Senior Research Fellow of Sichuan University, Lena investigated multi-ethnic folk medicines in China’s West. In a database team at Charité Medical University Berlin, she designed the translation, scientific identification and interdisciplinary accessibility of Chinese historical pharma-recipes.
