Taming the Poisonous Mercury, Toxicity, and Safety in Tibetan Medical Practice

Description

Barbara Gerke's new book "Taming the Poisonous: Mercury, Toxicity, and Safety in Tibetan Medical Practice" is rich ethnographic and socio-historical account uncovers how toxicity and safety are expressed transculturally in a globalizing world. For the first time, it unpacks the “pharmaceutical nexus” of mercury in Tibetan medicine, where, since the thirteenth century, it has mainly been used in the form of tsotel (btso thal). Tsotel, an organometallic mercury sulfide compound, is added in small amounts to specific medicines to enhance the potency of other ingredients. In concordance with tantric Buddhist ideas, Tibetan medical practitioners confront and tame poisonous substances, and instead of avoiding or expelling them, transform them into potent medicines and elixirs. Cover, Front Title Table of Contents A Note on Tibetan and Sanskrit Terms List of Abbreviations List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Maps Chapter 1 Introduction: “It takes time to tame a wild horse” Transculturality in acts of translation Chapter outline The fieldsites Methodological and ethnographic challenges in the field The ethnographic positionality of safety Chapter 2 Setting the Scene: Poison and Potency Taming substances and the origin myth of poisons Sourcing mercury Following the poison: An ethnography Exploring concepts: Pure or processed? The politics of mercury toxicity Chapter 3 The Pharmaceutical Nexus of Mercury Practices Dynamics of support The Dalai Lamas and mercury practices Making tsotel in a Chinese labor camp in 1977 Making tsotel in exile Chapter 4 History and Knowledge Transmission Situating mercury practices between science and religion Narratives of mercury transmissions from India to Tibet Orgyen Rinchenpel receives the tsodru chenmo practice from Vajrayoginī Mercury refinement practices in Tibet (fourteenth to nineteenth centuries) Heterogeneity, lineages, and the question of origins Secrecy and Tibetan publications on mercury formulations Chapter 5 Blood and Semen: Women and Mercury The missing ingredient Embodied metals in Indian alchemy Tibetan women processing mercury Body and gender in early Buddhist and Tibetan medical literature Protected places of mercury processing Gendered voices Chapter 6 The Evidence of Safety Assessing risk Short mercury processing techniques and their evaluations of safety Taming the poisons of mercury: The long processing technique Tsodru Chenmo Occupational safety Changing risk and safety assessments Chapter 7 Taming the Poisonous and the Potent Regulating multi-compound elixirs The patronage of science Translating epistemologies of toxicity Contamination and the ecological turn Chapter 8 Conclusions Enlarging the pharmaceutical nexus The poison-medicine spectrum The taming narrative Patronized practice Science as a patron The demons of the Anthropocene and the limits of taming Appendices Appendix A: Relevant Chemical Mercury Compounds,their Absorption, and Toxicity Appendix B: Tsotel Manufacture Events at the Men-Tsee-Khang in Dharamsala (1982–2014) Appendix C: Small-Scale Tsotel Events (1953–2008) Appendix D: The Collected Works on Mercury Formulations Glossaries of Tibetan and Sanskrit Terms 1: Who is Who? Glossary of Tibetan Names 2: Glossary of Recurrent Tibetan Terms (Including Place Names) 3: Glossary of Tibetan Formula Names 4: Glossary of Sanskrit Names and Terms References Tibetan-Language Sources Other Sources Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z Cover, Back