יום ב' ,8.3.2004, 18:00 - 20:00
חדר 496 בנין גילמן

דר' אסף גולדשמיט,
אוניברסיטת תל-אביב

מסחור הרפואה או טובת הציבור?
בית המקחת האימפריאלי הראשון בסין

Commercializing Medicine or Benefiting the People -
The First Public Pharmacy in China

The goal of this talk, besides depicting the history of the Imperial Pharmacy in China during its first century of its existence (1076-1175), is twofold. First, to show that initially the Song government did not establish the pharmacy to enhance medicine per se. Rather Song officials established it as an economic mean to control the price fluctuations of the drugs sold in open markets and to limit the profits gained by private merchants. Additionally, serving as one of a few market monopolies, the establishment of the pharmacy was intended to supply the government with additional income to support its budget. The pharmacy also featured an innovative trait enabling it to regulate the market - providing a stable supply of a larger-than-before variety of drugs. Only during the reign of emperor Huizong (r. 1101-1126), a quarter of a century after the pharmacy was established, did its focus swerved toward medicine rather than economy. Economic considerations, however, continued to play a significant role in the decision-making mechanism and business strategy of the pharmacy.

        The second goal of this paper is to show that once the pharmacy changed its focus to medicine rather than regulating the market, it served as a conceivable catalyst for a fundamental transformation in medicine, namely the integration of drug therapy and the doctrines of canonical medicine that began earlier with the mass printing of medical canons by the Bureau of Revising and Publishing Medical Texts and the re-introduction of the Treatise on Cold Damage Disorders.